New Year, New Bolt

Welcome to 2020!

The team has been on vacation hard at work since the last update, adding a bevy of new features as well as formalizing and sanding the rough edges of existing features to prepare for the imminent Bolt 2.0 release.

A bulk of the work has been finalizing the v2 inventory, which will fittingly be the inventory API for Bolt 2.0. You can check out the previous update for some more info on what that means.

We’ve made a number of enhancements to the plugin system, including adding more out-of-the-box integrations. These now include Azure, AWS, Terraform, and Vault among others.

Plugins can now be configured in both bolt.yaml and inventory.yaml using other plugins. For instance, you can use the Vault plugin to lookup credentials to connect to AWS.

Several new commands have joined the CLI, including bolt project init and bolt project migrate to create and manage Bolt projects, as well as bolt group show to see the targets in a group.

Bolt 2.0

The Bolt 2.0 release will be coming soon and we encourage everyone to upgrade. The bolt project migrate command will automatically translate your Bolt inventory file to the v2 format, which is a great way to prepare for the release.

The backward-incompatible changes will be minimal and primarily target under-used or downright unusable features. In particular, the changes include:

• The bolt-inventory-pdb command will be removed in favor of the puppetdb inventory plugin
• The --nodes flag will be replaced with --targets
• v1 inventory files will no longer be supported (use bolt project migrate to convert your inventory file)
• The low-level API for dynamically creating and modifying Target objects in a plan has been cleaned up and now works reliably

If you want to test your project against Bolt 2.0 today, set future: true in bolt.yaml to enable Bolt 2.0 compatibility mode.

Previous post: Sep 26th, 2019 - The Road to Bolt 2.0