Additional command line tools

Once you understand how to write manifests, validate them, and use puppet apply to enforce your changes, you're ready to use commands such as puppet agent, puppet resource, and puppet module install.

puppet agent

Like puppet apply, the puppet agent command line tool applies configuration changes to a system. However, puppet agent retrieves compiled catalogs from a Puppet Server, and applies them to the local system. Puppet is installed as a Windows service, and by default tries to contact the primary server every 30 minutes by running puppet agent to retrieve new catalogs and apply them locally.

puppet resource

You can run puppet resource to query the state of a particular type of resource on the system. For example, to list all of the users on a system, run the command puppet resource user.

A terminal window showing user information, such as user groups and user
ID, returned by the puppet resource user command.

The computer used for this example has three local user accounts: Administrator, Guest, and vagrant. Note that the output is the same format as a manifest, and you can copy and paste it directly into a manifest.

puppet module install

Puppet includes many core resource types, plus you can extend Puppet by installing modules. Modules contain additional resource definitions and the code necessary to modify a system to create, read, modify, or delete those resources. The PuppetForge contains modules developed by Puppet and community members available for anyone to use.

Puppet synchronizes modules from a primary server to agent nodes during puppet agent runs. Alternatively, you can use the standalone Puppet module tool, included when you install Puppet, to manage, view, and test modules.

Run puppet module list to show the list of modules installed on the system.

To install modules, the Puppet module tool uses the syntax puppet module install NAMESPACE/MODULENAME. The NAMESPACE is registered to a module, and MODULE refers to the specific module name. A very common module to install on Windows is registry, under the puppetlabs namespace. So, to install the registry module, run puppet module install puppetlabs/registry.