As we continue to provide our users with a curated and personalized experience on the Puppet Forge, we are happy to announce the release of two more new features: Organization Identity and Follow Modules
Organization Identity
In May 2024, we announced the release of the Forge user-profile downloads tracking feature. Many users shared how easy it was to get a consolidated view of their module estate. This visibility, which earlier would require a separate tooling effort, was now nudging users into ensuring module updates where it made sense. But we also received a few enhancement requests, for example:
This makes sense — Puppet management is usually a task entrusted to a team and not an individual, especially in larger estates. The download report should be accessible to all members of the team to drive shared responsibility through shared visibility.
Many of the Forge publishers also shared their pain of managing modules through a single Forge account. A module might have multiple contributors and managing these contributions through a single account is troublesome at best and a security flaw at worst.
The new Organization Identity feature aims to resolve these challenges. A signed-in Forge user can now create ‘Organizations’ or groups on Forge. For a Puppet lead, this means that they can create a Forge organization, invite their team members to join it and collaboratively work towards ensuring an updated Puppet infrastructure by using the shared view of downloads report:
For a module publisher team, it means, their newly created organization can now be the owner of the module they publish. All the members of the organization can make updates to and delete releases if they wish to, and they don’t have to worry about sharing a single account.
A new context is created in your logged in session for every organization you are a part of. So, if you are collaborating with your teammates on updating modules in one organization but are preparing for a new release in the other, you can easily switch contexts and every action you take will be under the organizational context you are currently in:
We hope with this release, the Forge has come closer to replicating how infrastructure is managed and how teams work together in the successful Puppet organizations.
Want to learn more? Please refer to the detailed documentation for this feature on the Puppet docs website.
Follow Modules
Imagine that you are planning to update your Puppet version. Of the 10 Forge modules in your estate, 2 currently do not claim support for the version you want to move to. You reach out to the module publisher and request for an update or be a good Samaritan and provide PRs to update the module.
Now all you can do is wait. You probably will have the urge to check Forge for updates, on a daily basis. You do it for a few days and then life takes over and you forget about it or deprioritize it over the ever-increasing to-do list.
If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. Many of our users have had this request and with ‘Follow Modules’ going live, you can just follow i.e. subscribe to those 2 modules and Forge will tell you when there’s an update to those modules.
You will receive email alerts (this setting is configurable) and notifications on your Forge profile. Oh yes! We have a new notifications page which allows you to keep track of the activities of interest to you. These include updates to the modules you follow (e.g. new releases, deprecation, etc.) and changes to the organizations you are a part of. You can view the list of modules you follow in your profile view:
You can watch this short video for a quick sneak peek into these brand new value additions.
The Road Ahead
I look forward to discussing the ideas you have on how we can enhance these features (a way to log those is in the section below). But there are a few areas which we think would be extremely valuable. E.g. the ability of organization admins to mark certain modules as favorites or ready-to-use, so that members don’t spend effort researching the perfect modules for their needs. We also aim to achieve content transfer between accounts so that module publishers can collaboratively manage their currently existing modules, post-transfer to the organization account
Feedback
The Puppet Forge team is grateful to all the Puppet users who've contributed suggestions for developing the Forge over the years. Now, the team invites you to try these new features and report any issues or suggestions for improvements. You can post comments in the #forge-modules Slack channel of the Puppet Community. You can also log any issues you face, and any enhancement requests you have in the forge_issues GitHub repository.
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