Puppet Installation Manager (PIM)
A guided Go TUI that turned expert-only, multi-host Puppet Enterprise installs into a repeatable few-minute flow: the one supported install path, driving the PEADM orchestration engine with high-availability and disaster recovery built in.
The problem
Installing Puppet Enterprise was an expert’s job. A production deployment meant standing up a primary server, replicas for failover, PostgreSQL/PuppetDB nodes and compilers, then wiring them together by hand across a jump host, in the right order, with the right certificates and trusted facts. Dozens of manual steps, easy to get subtly wrong, and no single supported path: customers stitched together their own scripts, and when an install drifted, support carried the cost.
What I did
I conceived and built PIM, the Puppet Installation Manager, from concept to delivery: a guided Go terminal UI (Bubble Tea / Charm) that walks a customer through a supported PE install, then executes it. I led a team of five and owned the TUI end to end.
A few terminal prompts in, a supported HA-ready Puppet Enterprise deployment out.
- A guided install, not a runbook. The TUI asks about the environment and the topology you need, then configures and runs the install for you, or takes a JSON file for fully unattended, repeatable automation. The same tool installs and upgrades.
- Every supported architecture. Standard, large and extra-large, from a jump host onto remote nodes, with disaster recovery through a primary-server replica that takes over if the primary fails.
- PEADM as the engine. Under the TUI, PIM drives PEADM, the open-source Bolt module that does the real orchestration: idempotent install, upgrade, convert, expand and recover across the PE node groups. I inherited PEADM and drove it forward as PIM’s foundation.
- The one supported path. Instead of every customer hand-rolling install scripts, PIM became the standard, reproducible way to stand up PE, with fewer broken installs, less drift and less support load.
Impact
- Collapsed an expert-only, dozens-of-steps manual install into a guided flow a customer can run in minutes, then re-run identically from JSON.
- Established one supported install + upgrade path for Puppet Enterprise, replacing ad-hoc per-customer scripting.
- HA and disaster recovery built in, idempotent end to end via PEADM, across standard, large and extra-large topologies.
Proof
PIM ships as a downloadable Puppet product and is documented in Puppet’s official PE docs. The orchestration engine, PEADM, is open source on GitHub (Apache 2.0), with public commit history, releases and topology support.