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Bolt Developer Updates November 2020

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Erin O'Malley
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Find out what the Bolt team is working on and why we're making the decisions we're making.

November 2020

Changes coming in Bolt 3.0

With the new year fast approaching, the team is preparing to release the next major version of Bolt: Bolt 3.0! Over the next few releases you'll start to see deprecation warnings for specific features and configuration options that are slated for removal in Bolt 3.0. To help you prepare for the release, we've compiled a list of expected changes and removals.

Changes

  • Ship with Puppet 7

    Bolt packages will ship with Puppet 7. This change should not impact most users, but changes to the Puppet language may require updating your Bolt plans.

    To read more about the changes in Puppet 7, see the Puppet 7 release notes.

  • Ship with Ruby 2.7

    Bolt packages will ship with Ruby 2.7 instead of Ruby 2.5.1. This change will not affect most users who install the Bolt package, as Bolt packages ship with their own Ruby. However, gem installs will require Ruby 2.7 or higher, and users who install gems with Bolt's Ruby may also need to update their gems.

  • New default modulepath

    Since the introduction of the module feature in Bolt 2.30.0, Bolt has used a shorter, simpler default modulepath when a project enables the feature. Starting in Bolt 3.0, the module management feature will be enabled for all projects, meaning the default modulepath will also be updated.

    To read more about the new module management workflow and the updated modulepath, see the modules overview.

  • Move PowerShell module to PowerShell Gallery

    The PuppetBolt PowerShell module will be distributed through PowerShell Gallery.

  • Ship with bolt.bat file on Windows

    Bolt packages on Windows will ship with a bolt.bat batch file. This will disable the bolt and Invoke-BoltCommandLine commands in Powershell. Users should instead use the built-in PowerShell cmdlets.

  • New default configuration for the local transport

    In Bolt 2.x, Bolt applied the following settings to targets named localhost by default:

    targets:
  - name: localhost
    config:
      transport: local
      local:
        interpreters:
          .rb: RbConfig.ruby # This uses the Ruby we ship with Bolt
    features:
      - puppet-agent

    These settings will now be applied to all targets using the local transport. Settings can be overridden at the target level in inventory. They can also be enabled or disabled starting in Bolt 2.37 using the bundled-ruby local transport config option.

  • apply_settings configuration option renamed to apply-settings

    Most other configuration options in Bolt use hyphens instead of underscores.

    For a full list of project configuration options, see the bolt-project.yaml options reference page.

  • plugin_hooks configuration option renamed to plugin-hooks

    Most other configuration options in Bolt use hyphens instead of underscores.

    For a full list of project configuration options, see the bolt-project.yaml options reference page.

  • puppetfile configuration option renamed to module-install

    This configuration option has a confusing name that implies the path to a Puppetfile. The new name more clearly indicates that it configures how modules are installed.

    For a full list of project configuration options, see the bolt-project.yaml options reference page.

    • target key for YAML plan steps renamed to targets

    This key has been deprecated in favor of the targets key.

    For more information about writing YAML plans, see writing YAML plans.

  • source key for YAML plan upload step renamed to upload

    This key has been deprecated in favor of the upload key.

    For more information about upload YAML plan step, see writing YAML plans.

  • private-key and public-key parameters for pkcs7 plugin renamed to private_key and public_key

    These keys have been deprecated in favor of the private_key and public_key parameters.

    For more information about the pkcs7 plugin, see the Forge documentation.

Removals

  • Packages for Debian 8 will be removed

    Debian 8 reached end-of-life on June 30, 2020.

    For a full list of supported platforms, see installing Bolt.

  • Support for bolt.yaml configuration file will be removed

    Bolt will no longer support the bolt.yaml configuration file. Instead, you should use bolt-project.yaml in your project and bolt-defaults.yaml at the user and system level.

    For more information about configuring your project, see configuring Bolt.

  • bolt puppetfile * commands and *-BoltPuppetfile PowerShell cmdlets will be removed

    These commands are being removed in favor of the new bolt module * commands and *-BoltModule PowerShell cmdlets.

    To read more about the new module management workflow and the updated modulepath, see the modules overview.

  • Support for PowerShell 2.0 will be dropped

    PowerShell 2.0 has been deprecated since 2017 and adds unecessary complexity for Bolt. Bolt will no longer support running on controllers when using PowerShell 2.0 or when connecting to remote targets running PowerShell 2.0.

  • --boltdir command-line option will be removed

    This command-line option has been deprecated in favor of --project.

  • --configfile command-line option will be removed

    This command-line option provides little value and adds unecessary complexity to Bolt. Instead, use the --project command-line option to run Bolt from a specific project.

  • --debug command-line option will be removed

    This command-line option has been deprecated in favor of --log-level debug. Additionally, Bolt now writes a debug log to bolt-debug.log by default, removing the need to explicitly run in debug mode for most users.

  • --description command-line option will be removed

    This command-line option provides little value.

  • inventoryfile configuration option will be removed

    Bolt already offers the --inventoryfile command-line option to use a non-default inventory file for a single run. However, there is little value in configuring a permanent non-default inventoryfile for a project.

  • notice log level will be removed

    The notice log level has already been soft-deprecated. Bolt does not log any messages at this level. Messages logged in apply blocks using the notice() function are logged by Bolt at the info level.

Updating your project

While some of these changes will require you to manually update files, others can be made automatically with Bolt. We'll be updating the project migrate command to automatically update your Bolt project to use the latest features and best practices. You can run this command now to pick up any changes that have already been made, or wait until Bolt 3.0 is released to pick up all changes at once.

To migrate your project, run the following command in your project directory:

*nix shell command

bolt project migrate

PowerShell cmdlet

Update-BoltProject

Keep in mind that this command only makes changes to a project. Changes to plans and configuration files at the user and system level will need to be made manually. For more information on how the migrate command changes your project files, see Migrate a Bolt project.

Puppet 7 Release Prep

Puppet 7 is set to be released November 19th, 2020. While the Bolt package won't be pulling in Puppet 7 until early next year, the puppet_agent::install task bundled with Bolt will pick up Puppet 7 agents by default when the packages are available. This means that using the apply_prep() Bolt plan function or the install task directly will be pulling in a major version bump for the agent. While we don't anticipate any of the changes in the agent to affect Bolt users, if you find you need to use the Puppet 6 agent, you can configure apply_prep() and the puppet_agent::install task to do so.

The puppet_agent::install task accepts a collections parameter that tells the task which collection to download the package from. This defaults to puppet which maps to the latest collection, but you can set this value to puppet6 to pull in the latest Puppet 6 agent. You can pass this parameter on the command line:

*nix shell command

bolt task run puppet_agent::install -t mytargets collection='puppet6'

PowerShell cmdlet

Invoke-BoltTask -Name puppet_agent::install -Targets mytargets collection='puppet6'

Or to the run_task() plan function:

run_task('puppet_agent::install', $targets, { collection => 'puppet6' })

If you need the apply_prep() plan function to install the Puppet 6 agents instead of Puppet 7, you can configure this by configuring the puppet_library plugin hook in either bolt-project.yaml or bolt-defaults.yaml:

plugin_hooks:
  puppet_library:
    task: puppet_agent
    collection: puppet6
Find out what the Bolt team is working on and why we're making the decisions we're making. November 2020 Changes coming in Bolt 3.0 With the new year fast approaching, the team is preparing to release the next major version of Bolt: Bolt 3.0! Over the next few releases you'll start to see ...

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