The Puppet Start menu items

Puppet’s installer adds a folder of shortcut items to the Start Menu.

These items aren’t necessary for working with Puppet, because Puppet agent runs a normal Windows service and the Puppet commands work from any command or PowerShell prompt. They’re provided solely as conveniences.

The Start menu items do the following:

Run Facter

This shortcut requests UAC elevation and, using the CLI, runs Facter with administrator privileges.

Run Puppet agent

This shortcut requests UAC elevation and, using the CLI, performs a single Puppet agent command with administrator privileges.

Start Command Prompt with Puppet

This shortcut starts a normal command prompt with the working directory set to Puppet's program directory. The CLI window icon is also set to the Puppet logo. This shortcut was particularly useful in previous versions of Puppet, before Puppet's commands were added to the PATH at installation time.

This shortcut does not automatically request UAC elevation; just like with a normal command prompt, you'll need to right-click the icon and choose Run as administrator.