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{% include '/version.md' %}

Hello Bolt

Quest objectives

  • Install Bolt.
  • Verify the Bolt installation.
  • Run simple commands using Bolt.

Get started

In this quest, you will install Bolt and run some introductory commands. As described in the previous quest, Bolt is a task runner that enables you to invoke commands on one or more target nodes. It is well-suited to performing actions in an ad hoc manner instead of managing a node on a long-term basis.

Ready to get started? Run the following command on your Learning VM to begin this quest:

quest begin hello_bolt

Install Bolt

Task 1:

Pre-built Bolt packages are available for various Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora distributions, as well as Windows and macOS. The Learning VM is based on a CentOS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux equivalent) 7 image, so run the following command to configure the Puppet YUM repository:

rpm -Uvh https://yum.puppet.com/puppet-tools-release-el-7.noarch.rpm

NOTE: If your Learning VM is configured with a host-only network, the previous command will fail, but the puppet-bolt package has been cached for convenience.

Now run this command to install Bolt:

yum install puppet-bolt

Verify the Bolt installation

Task 2:

Now that you have installed Bolt successfully, let's run some commands to verify that it works correctly.

bolt --help

bolt --version

Task 3:

Bolt provides a command-line interface for running commands, scripts, tasks and plans on the local machine or remote nodes. Now let's practice running some simple commands:

bolt command run 'free -th' --targets localhost

This command shows a human-readable report of the total memory allocated to the local machine, how much is used and how much is free. The output should look something like this:

Started on localhost...
Finished on localhost:
  STDOUT:
                  total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:           3.7G        2.3G        143M        183M        1.2G        878M
    Swap:          1.0G         10M        1.0G
    Total:         4.7G        2.3G        1.1G
Successful on 1 node: localhost
Ran on 1 node in 0.01 seconds

This demonstrates trivial usage of Bolt, but since the command is running on the local machine, you could just as easily run free -th to get the same output.

Bolt is better suited to running commands on one or more remote nodes so the output can be collected and potentially acted upon by another tool. And instead of using a tool like ssh in a for loop, you provide a list of nodes to Bolt, and it will connect to each one and run the desired command. Now let's try some examples using a Docker-hosted machine as target node:

bolt command run hostname --targets docker://bolt.puppet.vm

bolt command run 'cat /etc/hosts' --targets docker://bolt.puppet.vm

The output from these commands will look similar to the following:

Started on bolt.puppet.vm...
Finished on bolt.puppet.vm:
  STDOUT:
    bolt.puppet.vm
Successful on 1 node: docker://bolt.puppet.vm
Ran on 1 node in 0.05 seconds

Started on bolt.puppet.vm...
Finished on bolt.puppet.vm:
  STDOUT:
    127.0.0.1   localhost
    ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
    fe00::0     ip6-localnet
    ff00::0     ip6-mcastprefix
    ff02::1     ip6-allnodes
    ff02::2     ip6-allrouters
    172.18.0.1  learning.puppetlabs.vm puppet
    172.18.0.2  bolt.puppet.vm bolt
Successful on 1 node: docker://bolt.puppet.vm
Ran on 1 node in 0.05 seconds

Perhaps you want to generate machine-parseable output. That is also possible by using the --format option to the bolt command like so:

bolt --format json command run 'cat /etc/hosts' --targets docker://bolt.puppet.vm

And the output will look similar to the following:

{ "items": [
{"node":"docker://bolt.puppet.vm","status":"success","result":{"stdout":"127.0.0.1\tlocalhost\n::1\tlocalhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback\nfe00::0\tip6-localnet\nff00::0\tip6-mcastprefix\nff02::1\tip6-allnodes\nff02::2\tip6-allrouters\n172.18.0.1\tlearning.puppetlabs.vm puppet\n172.18.0.2\tbolt.puppet.vm bolt\n","stderr":"","exit_code":0}}
],
"node_count": 1, "elapsed_time": 0 }

The output can then be piped into a JSON query tool, such as jq, for further processing. There are a number of other useful bolt command-line options, and you can see them by running bolt --help.

Review

In this quest, you installed Bolt, verified the installation and practiced running some simple commands to get a feel for usage. Bolt is a flexible task runner that can target multiple nodes at once, connect to different types of nodes with a variety of protocols, including SSH, WinRM and Docker, as shown in this quest.

Additional Resources

  • Download Bolt on your own machine.
  • Read the Bolt documentation for more details about all of its use cases.
  • Dive deeper with a Bolt and Puppet tasks self-paced course and learn how to manage nodes with Bolt, using it from the command-line and the Puppet Enterprise Console.