Overview and requirements

PuppetDB collects data generated by Puppet®. It enables advanced Puppet features like exported resources, and can be the foundation for other applications that use Puppet's data.

Install it now

To start using PuppetDB today:

Version note

This documentation covers PuppetDB 8, which adds several new features and contains some breaking changes since PuppetDB 7.

See the release notes for information on all changes.

What data?

PuppetDB stores:

  • The most recent facts from every node
  • The most recent catalog for every node
  • Optionally, 14 days (configurable) of event reports for every node

Together, these give you a huge inventory of metadata about every node in your infrastructure and a searchable database of every single resource being managed on any node.

Puppet itself can search a subset of this data using exported resources, which allow nodes to manage resources on other nodes. This is similar to the capabilities of the legacy ActiveRecord storeconfigs interface, but much, much faster. The remaining data is available through PuppetDB's query APIs (see the navigation sidebar for details).

System requirements

*nix server with JVM 11+

Java 17 is recommended, but Java 11 is also supported.

Standard installation: RHEL, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu

Puppet provides PuppetDB packages and a module which simplify the setup of its SSL certificates and init scripts. The packages are available for the following operating systems:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, 8, and 9
  • SuSE Enterprise Linux 12, 15
  • Debian 10 (Buster), and 11 (Bullseye)
  • Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) LTS, 20.04 (Focal), 22.04 (Jammy) LTS

Install PuppetDB from OS packages.

Custom installation: Any Unix-like OS

If you're willing to do some manual configuration, PuppetDB version 8.0.0 through 8.8.0 can run on any Unix-like OS with JVM 11 or newer, including:

  • Recent macOS versions (using built-in support)
  • Nearly any Linux distribution using OpenJDK 11 or Oracle JDK 11
  • Nearly any *nix distribution using OpenJDK 11 or Oracle JDK 11

See here for advanced installation instructions.

Puppet 8.0.0

Your site's Puppet Server must be running Puppet Server 8.0.0 or later. You will need to connect your Puppet Servers to PuppetDB after installing it. If you want to use PuppetDB with standalone nodes that are running puppet apply, every node must be running 8.0.0 or later.

PostgreSQL 14

Use PostgreSQL 14 or later with PuppetDB 8 to take advantage of new features in PuppetDB.

PuppetDB requires PostgreSQL 11 or later. If not provided by your distribution, compatible versions of PostgreSQL can be installed from the PGDG (PostgreSQL Global Development Group) repositories. See apt.postgresql.org or yum.postgresql.org for more information.

Robust hardware

PuppetDB is a critical component of your Puppet deployment and should be run on a robust and reliable server.

However, PuppetDB can do a lot with fairly modest hardware. In benchmarks using real-world catalogs from a customer, a single 2012 laptop (16 GB of RAM, consumer-grade SSD, and quad-core processor) running PuppetDB and PostgreSQL was able to keep up with sustained input from 8,000 simulated Puppet nodes checking in every 30 minutes. Powerful server-grade hardware performs even better.

The actual requirements vary wildly depending on your site's size and characteristics. At small sites, you might even be able to run PuppetDB on your Puppet Server.

For more on fitting PuppetDB to your site, see our scaling recommendations.