Install/upgrade documentation notes for 3.17.0

Support
1

Problem:

Foreman 3.17.0 seems to require Puppet 8 or above:

[root@foreman ~]# foreman-installer --noop --verbose
2025-12-25 22:53:13 [NOTICE] [root] Loading installer configuration. This will take some time.
Puppet 7.34.0 does not meet requirements for puppetlabs-apache (>= 8.0.0 < 9.0.0)
Cannot continue due to incompatible version of Puppet. Use --skip-puppet-version-check to disable this check.
2025-12-25 22:53:19 [ERROR ] [root] Puppet 7.34.0 does not meet requirements for puppetlabs-apache (>= 8.0.0 < 9.0.0)
2025-12-25 22:53:19 [ERROR ] [root] Incompatible version of Puppet used, cannot continue

The upgrade instructions don’t mention upgrading Puppet, but probably should.

In section 3.1.3, there’s a chart of supported Puppet versions, but 7.x is still listed as supported.

In post-upgrade steps 3(A) the instructions say the output of foreman-rake db:migrate and db:seed should output nothing. On my systems they output:

[root@foreman ~]# foreman-rake db:migrate
== 20250109165511 RemoveTaxonomyAndOverrideFromFilter: migrating ==============
-- remove_column(:filters, :override)
   -> 0.0790s
== 20250109165511 RemoveTaxonomyAndOverrideFromFilter: migrated (0.2530s) =====

== 20251015113343 ClearHostOwnerSetting: migrating ============================
== 20251015113343 ClearHostOwnerSetting: migrated (0.0013s) ===================

[root@foreman ~]# foreman-rake db:seed
User with login admin already exists, not seeding as admin.

The DB migrations look reasonable based on the dates, and I guess db:seed is okay? Running them a second time did result in no output.

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2

Another note, during the upgrade I got a warning:

2025-12-25 23:06:11 [ERROR ] [configure] /Stage[main]/Foreman_proxy::Plugin::Discovery/Foreman_proxy::Remote_file[/var/lib/tftpboot/boot/fdi-image-latest.tar]/File[/var/lib/tftpboot/boot/fdi-image-latest.tar]: Could not evaluate: Could not retrieve information from environment production source(s) https://downloads.theforeman.org/discovery/releases/5.1/fdi-image-latest.tar

The URL should be for version 5.1.0 (not 5.1) or 5.1.1.

3

Running into the same issue.

As I don’t know how to upgrade Puppet, I will restore my snapshot back to 3.16.

The upgrade documentation appears to be incomplete.

4

I was able to upgrade Puppet with

sudo dnf -y install ``https://yum.puppet.com/puppet8-release-el-9.noarch.rpm

after which dnf upgrade should succeed with the new dependency.

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5

I concur, I hit this problem on Rocky Linux 9 and as I know zero about Puppet would have been stuck without this thread.

To be clear, I did these in this sequence (numbers from the Foreman + Katello upgrade guide)

5. Upgrade all packages:

# dnf upgrade

6. Run the Foreman installer:

# foreman-installer

(This failed)

# dnf install https://yum.puppet.com/puppet8-release-el-9.noarch.rpm

# dnf upgrade

This second upgrade, upgraded the puppet-agent to 8.10. After doing that, I was successful with

# foreman-installer

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6

Also ran into the same error. As our site is not yet ready to upgrade to Puppet 8 or 9, could we get eyes from the Foreman dev team on this thread and confirm if Puppet 7 can still be used with Foreman 3.17, and if so, what is the workaround to proceed with the install. Thank you!