How can I fix puppet refusing to start and asking for "master.pp"?

Question

I'm using the very latest version of puppet and have been following the Apress "Pro Puppet" guide step by step. I have installed puppet

sudo aptitude install ruby libshadow-ruby1.8
sudo aptitude install puppet puppetmaster facter

I have edited /etc/puppet/puppet.conf to include certname

[master]
certname=puppet.mydomain.com

I have edited /etc/hosts and added the following line

127.0.0.1 puppet.mydomain.com puppet

I have set the hostname of the server

echo "puppet.mydomain.com" > /etc/hostname
hostname -F /etc/hostname

And then I try and run puppet from the command line.

puppet master --verbose --no-daemonize

And puppet gives me this error:

Could not parse for environment production:
Could not find file /master.pp

I'm running all commands with sudo and the last line of the error message always says that it can't find master.pp and the path before it is to my current working directory.

What am I doing wrong?

I should also mention that I don't have a DNS record set up for puppet.mydomain.com - I saw some online documentation mentioning this might be a problem - however I was fairly sure that the hosts file would let me get around that.

Answer 1

It almost seems like you're using an old version of Puppet, which doesn't understand the master subcommand, and tries to run it as a manifest instead. Somewhere around 0.25 the new command syntax was introduced.

Double-check which version you're running. The current version should be 2.7. I've often found that distros package older versions. For example, Ubuntu 10.04LTS installs 0.25.4, which is pretty ancient.

Answer 2

To find out the version of the puppet package, run:

sudo apt-cache policy puppet

Answer 3

Martijn is right. Your puppet version is definitely older than 2.6. Are you running an old version of Ubuntu or Debian? Squeeze already includes 2.6 and Ubuntu 11 includes 2.7. If you are on Lenny, you can find a newer version of Puppet on backports. And, if none of that helps, I think puppetlabs has a repository for newer puppet versions, though it might give you some trouble with ruby version.