Running Puppet agent as a service

The Puppet installer configures Puppet agent to run as a Windows service and starts it. No further action is needed. Puppet agent does configuration runs at a set interval.

Configuring the run interval

The Puppet agent service defaults to doing a configuration run every 30 minutes. If you don’t need frequent configuration runs, a longer run interval lets your Puppet primary servers handle many more agent nodes.

You can configure this with the runinterval setting in puppet.conf:

# C:\ProgramData\PuppetLabs\puppet\etc\puppet.conf
[agent]
  runinterval = 2h

After you change the run interval, the next run happens on the previous schedule, and subsequent runs happen on the new schedule.

Configuring the service start up type

The Puppet agent service defaults to starting automatically. If you want to start it manually or disable it, you can configure this during installation.

To do this, install using the CLI and specify the PUPPET_AGENT_STARTUP_MODE MSI property.

You can also configure this after installation with the Service Control Manager (SCM). To start the SCM, click Start -> Run... and enter Services.msc.

You can also configure agent service with the sc.exe command. To prevent the service from starting on boot, run the following command from the Command Prompt (cmd.exe):

sc config puppet start= demand

To stop and restart the service, run the following commands:

sc stop puppet
sc start puppet

To change the arguments used when triggering a Puppet agent run, add flags to the command:

sc start puppet --debug --logdest eventlog

This example changes the level of detail that gets written to the Event Log.