Chapter 7. New Features from Puppet 4
Now that we have a complete overview on the Puppet DSL and its concepts, it is time to look at the newest Puppet features that were introduced with Puppet version 4. The parser, which compiles the catalog, was basically rewritten from scratch for better performance. The milestone release also added some missing functionality and coding principles.
Puppet 4 does not only offer new functionality, but breaks with old practices and removes some functionality that is not considered a best practice anymore. This necessitates that any existing manifest code needs proper testing and potentially lots of changes to be compatible with Puppet 4.
Within this chapter, the following topics will be covered:
- Upgrading to Puppet 4
- Using the Puppet Type System
- Learning Lambdas and Functions
- Creating Puppet 4 Functions
- Leveraging the new template engine
- Handling multiline with HEREDOC
- Breaking old practices
