ReBolt - Install Puppet Bolt from RubyGems

What

Installs Puppet Bolt gem and the Puppet Forge modules it requires.

Why

Puppet makes it hard to run Bolt without using their binary packages. They provide zero documentation on how to do so, but have plenty of warnings on their website not to try it. I wanted to be able to run Bolt on my Mac Studio without using Rosetta, both in macOS and in a Linux VM. With the official binary packages none of this is possible. But come on, it's open source and as I noted above Bolt is on RubyGems!

Puppet's official binary packages consistantly lag in platform support. They have no support for arm64, except under Rosetta on macOS, and no arm64 at all on Linux. You may also want to run Bolt on a more recent Ruby version than the vendored version that Puppet ships, or just want to manage your own copy rather than depending on their packages. Or maybe you want to run Bolt on a Raspberry Pi!

Finally, the binary package makes it hard to find where relevant files (like the built in modules) are and understand how Bolt actually works. Installing Bolt from RubyGems and Puppet Forge, should help demystify things, even if you still stick to the official binaries for production use.

Installation

• Install ruby:
  • brew install ruby / apt-get install ruby / etc.
    • Do not use the ruby shipped by Apple with macOS, it's far too old to work.
  • Confirm that bundler is installed (it's included with rubies from Homebrew)
    • bundle --version
    • If not, install it from your OS package manager (apt-get install ruby-bundler, etc.)
• Clone this repo, cd into it.
• bundle install
• rake

Updating

• This repo: git pull
• Puppet Bolt gem and its gem dependencies: bundle update --all
• Puppet Forge modules: rake

Important: after updating the Bolt gem with bundle, you must run rake again or you may be left with out of date Forge modules.

Troubleshooting:

If you see this warning, it means that Bolt's module dependencies are missing.

Bolt might be installed as a gem. To use Bolt reliably and with all of its
dependencies, uninstall the 'bolt' gem and install Bolt as a package:
https://puppet.com/docs/bolt/latest/bolt_installing.html

Try running rake setup:modules or, maximally, rake clean:all; rake.

You don't have to take my word that running Bolt this way is safe. Take a look at the code that prints this warning. It's just checking for missing modules.