Exploring and configuring Bolt
Throughout this book so far, we have focused on Puppet’s strengths as a state-based and idempotent configuration management tool. But there are situations where this approach simply doesn’t fit, such as service restarts as part of troubleshooting or ordering application deployments with vendor-based install scripts. There is any number of tasks that fit into the wider automation effort that are ad hoc and single use; therefore, Bolt was introduced by Puppet to act as an agentless orchestrator. Bolt is now in its 3.x version, since its release in 2017, and a lot of rapid development has taken place. Over 2022, it stabilized, with far fewer releases and changes to features, but we would strongly advise you to keep Bolt as up to date as possible to avoid any confusion.
Having reviewed the general purpose of Bolt as an ad hoc task runner, the first step is to understand how Bolt can connect to clients with transports and targets.
