# ANNOUNCE: Puppet Beta Two

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/announce-puppet-beta-two/48611>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [November 22, 2005, 6:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/announce-puppet-beta-two/48611 "2005-11-22T18:47:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![luke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@luke](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/luke)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 6:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/announce-puppet-beta-two/48611/1 "2005-11-22T18:47:02Z")

</div>

[http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/news/beta2](http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/news/beta2)

After far too long, a new release of Puppet is out.

What Is Puppet?

Puppet is a next-generation server automation framework, written in Ruby  
and  
capable of functioning as an abstraction layer between you and the messy  
details of all of the operating systems you maintain. It lets you  
centrally  
manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform  
specification language that manages all the separate elements normally  
aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along  
with  
obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.

Puppet’s simple declarative specification language provides powerful  
classing abilities for drawing out the similarities between hosts while  
allowing them to be as specific as necessary, and it handles dependency  
and  
prerequisite relationships between objects clearly and explicitly.

Changes

- An external cfengine module for simple cfengine integration, allowing  
a gradual migration from cfengine to Puppet.
- User and Group management on most major platforms
- Cronjob management
- Significant enhancements to package management in most  
cases
- Addition of the node syntax
- File search paths

and many more.

Puppet is only still in Beta because it has not been installed at enough  
locations that I am confident it is sufficiently bug-free to be  
considered a  
full release. Although there are still plenty of planned feature  
updates, none  
of these are so critical that they are keeping the release back.

I am hoping to build some system packages of Puppet at some point soon,  
but for  
now you can either use tarballs or gems to install the latest release.

And I’ve also published a November Status Update:

[http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/news/novemberstatus](http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/news/novemberstatus)

An update on the world of Puppet and Reductive Labs

I know it’s been a long time since I produced an update in the Puppet  
world.  
The lack of updates have not been because of idleness, though; I’ve been  
busy  
adding lots of functionality to Puppet and working on getting the word  
out  
about it. The language is both simpler and more powerful than it was on  
the  
last release, and Puppet now manages the most important of the NSS-style  
elements like users and groups, which provides a clear path to manage  
the rest  
of them.

Beta Two

The most important new item in the Puppet world is that there is a new  
beta  
release out. There were a few critical features keeping this release  
back, such  
as the cfengine module and the file copying search paths, but they’re  
all in  
place now and can be read about on the beta’s announcement page.

At this point, the Puppet framework itself is comfortably ready for use,  
and it  
is straightforward (and sometimes even easy) to add new functionality to  
Puppet  
without modifying the rest of the framework.

Upcoming ;login; Article

I have written an article on Puppet for USENIX’s ;login: magazine. It  
details  
all of my nefarious plans for Puppet. Once it is in its final copy  
state, I  
will do what I can to make sure a copy is available for public download.

Puppet Presentations

I presented Puppet to the Atlanta Unix Users Group, and will be  
presenting it  
on November 30th to the Nashville Linux Users Group. BayLISA has also  
contacted  
me about presenting to them but I do not currently have plans to be in  
the Bay  
Area again soon, so if you are interested in sponsoring a trip to the  
Bay Area  
so I can present, please contact me.

Ongoing Conversations

I have been maintaining a blog about my conversations with myself about  
Puppet.  
It is a great place to get an idea of the thinking that goes into  
Puppet’s  
development and to get the latest announcements about Puppet. There is  
also a  
Puppet channel on [irc.freenode.net](http://irc.freenode.net) on #puppet; please join in.