For the Win

This project is a small set of Rake tasks to automate the process of building MSI packages for Puppet on Windows systems.

Screen Shots

The following screen shots show the current state of the graphical installer. These screen shots are generated automatically.

Shortcut Icons

The current icon being used looks like this:

UAC Integration

When running Puppet and Facter interactively using the Start Menu shortcuts, the process will automatically request Administrator rights using UAC:

Command Prompt

A shortcut named "Start Command Prompt with Puppet" will be created in the Start Menu. This shortcut automates the process of starting cmd.exe and manually setting the PATH and RUBYLIB environment variables.

This command windows looks like this:

Overview

This is a separate repository because it is meant to build MSI packages for arbitrary versions of Puppet, Facter and other related tools.

This project is meant to be checked out into a special Puppet Windows Dev Kit directory structure. This Dev Kit will provide the tooling necessary to actually build the packages.

This project requires these tools from the puppetbuilder Dev Kit for Windows systems.

• Ruby
• Rake
• Git
• 7zip
• WiX

Desktop Integration

Puppet and Facter can be run directly from the Explorer desktop by double clicking on run_puppet_interactive.bat and run_facter_interactive.bat. Shortcuts in the Start Menu will be added for these batch files.

These batch files are not meant to be run from other scripts or the Task Scheduler because they explicitly pause at the end to give the user a chance to review the output without cmd.exe vanishing on them. This looks like:

Getting Started

Given a basic Windows 2003 R2 x64 system with the Puppet Win Builder archive unpacked into C:/puppetwinbuilder/ the following are all that is required to build the MSI packages.

C:\>cd puppetwinbuilder
C:\puppetwinbuilder\> build
...

(REVISIT - This is the thing we're working to. Make sure this is accurate once implemented)

Making Changes

The Puppet Win Builder archive should remain relatively static. The purpose of this archive is simply to bootstrap the tools required for the build process.

Changes to the build process itself should happen in the Puppet For the Win repository on Github.

Continuous Integration

The build.bat build script should work just fine with a build system like Jenkins. If it does not, please let us know.

Building from Specific Repositories and Branches

The build system can be used to build a specific branch or repository of Puppet and Facter. To customize the Git reference to build you can first specific the repositories to clone with the windows:clone task and then specify the reference to checkout using the windows:checkout task.

This example builds a package given the latest development heads of the 2.7.x and 1.6.x integration branches.

rake clean
rake "windows:clone[git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet.git,git://github.com/puppetlabs/facter.git]"
rake "windows:checkout[origin/2.7.x,origin/1.6.x]"
rake windows:build

User Facing Customizations

Installation Directory CLI

The command line installation UX is implemented using the public INSTALLDIR property.

The installation directory may be specified on the command line by passing the property. This example logs verbosely to the install.txt file and performs a silent installation to C:\test\puppet which is not the default.

msiexec /qn /l*v install.txt /i puppet.msi INSTALLDIR="C:\puppet" PUPPET_MASTER_SERVER="puppetmaster.lan"

Public Properties

All of these are optional and their default values are in parentheses.

• INSTALLDIR ("%PROGRAMFILES%\Puppet Labs\Puppet")
• PUPPET_AGENT_CERTNAME (Unset, Puppet will default to using facter fqdn)
• PUPPET_MASTER_SERVER ("puppet")
• PUPPET_CA_SERVER (Unset, Puppet will default to using PUPPET_MASTER_SERVER)

If the PUPPET_AGENT_CERTNAME property is not set on the command line when installing the package, then no certname setting will be written to puppet.conf. There is no ability provided to configure the certificate name using the graphical installer, puppet.conf must be configured post-installation. Please see Ticket 12640 for information about why.

The value of PUPPET_AGENT_CERTNAME must be lower case as per Ticket 1168

Add Remove Programs

The installer is integrated well with the Add or Remove Programs feature of Microsoft Windows. The following screen shots show the current look:

Puppet Enterprise Facts

Facts required to connect a Windows Puppet agent to a Puppet Enterprise master are automatically written to Puppet's confdir. The facts will be stored in $confdir/facts.d/puppet_installer.txt

These facts are written for both the Puppet FOSS and Puppet Enterprise branded installation package. The following entries are written by default by the installer and may be changed after the package has been installed.

fact_stomp_port=61613
fact_is_puppetagent=true
fact_is_puppetmaster=false
fact_is_puppetconsole=false

The stomp server fact defaults to the puppet master hostname specified in the graphical installer, or using the PUPPET_MASTER_SERVER property in the command line installer.

fact_stomp_server=puppet

The stomp server and stomp port facts are put in place for future support of MCollective on Windows. These facts will not be used until MCollective support has been added to the Windows packages.

Troubleshooting

Missing .NET Framework

If you receive exit code 128 when running rake build tasks and it looks like candle and light don't actually do anything, it's likely because the Microsoft .NET Framework is not installed.

If you try to run candle.exe or light.exe from Explorer, you might receive "Application Error" - The application failed to initialize properly (0xC0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application. This is the same symptom and .NET should be installed.

In order to resolve this, please use Windows Update to install the .NET Framework 3.5 (Service Pack 1).

EOF