How hard would this module be to port to Windows?

[JohnEricson]

I'm planing on trying to use my existing Puppet manifest develop for Linux to install Pentaho BI on a Windows server. Right now I'm using this module. How much work do you think it is to port this to Windows? What dependencies might cause problem? And what should I focus on in order to skip most of the manual work in the installation? I'm fine with skipping the Augeas part of editing the config files, using File resources in Puppet would be ok for me.

[Spredzy]

Hello @JohnEricson, unfortunately I have no previous experience with Windows Servers and never have made a puppet run on one of those, so it will be hard for me to say.

But at first sight I do see potential issues :

1. The different packages. I don't know how Windows Server to treat them. How the package provider work on Windows ?
2. Wget/Archive dependency. Does wget exist on Windows Server? Does the wget module handles this platform ?
3. Augeas as you mentioned

I am certainly interested on the feedback you could provide from this experience though and if you have any success.

[JohnEricson]

Hi @Spredzy!

I've done some work on this already and managed to get it to run the module. I have some bits left to finish for Pentaho BI to start up proper. I've skipped augeas and management of jdbc drivers, instead I add these with simple file resources.

The main problem with package management on Windows is the lack of a real package manager :-) To solve this I use Chocolatey and for the Unix specific execs I install Cygwin on the server, that gives me access to all Unix commands. The Archive module is working fine, I don't think the Wget module is used right now as I skipped the JDBCs.

I'll get back to you when I'm having it in a good state and hope to share the changes as well.

[Tokynet]

Any update on this @JohnEricson ? I might have to support this on Windows too (not looking forward to it).
Thanks in advance!

[JohnEricson]

Sorry @Tokynet for not answering you earlier. Yes, I'm successfully running this on both mixed Windows and Linux installations. It's quite a big change and relies on Cygwin installed on Windows server for the porting of a lot of the modules. I've automated the install of Cygwin using Chocolatey. I'll take a look at uploading it to github.

[JohnEricson]

See my pull request for a fix on this here #12