R10k provides fairly fine grained controls over your environments to fit your needs. If you want to do a full update of all of your environments and modules and don't need it to be done in real time, you can trigger a full update and let it run in the background. If you are actively developing code and need to run very fast updates of one specific environment, you can do a targeted update of that code as well.
All commands that deal with deploying environments are grouped under the r10k deploy subcommand.
Recursively update all environments:
r10k deploy environment --puppetfile
The simplest way to use r10k is by simply updating all environments and modules and takes the brute force approach of "update everything, ever." When this command is run r10k will update all sources, create new environments and delete old environments, and recursively update all environment modules specified in environment Puppetfiles. While this is the simplest method for running r10k, is is also the slowest by a very large degree because it does the maximum possible work. This should not be something you run interactively, or use on a regular basis.
Update environments while avoiding unnecessary recursion:
r10k deploy environment
This will update existing environments and recursively create new environments. Note that when an environment is deployed for the first time, it will automatically update all modules as well. For subsequent updates only the environment itself will be updated.
Update a single environment:
r10k deploy environment my_working_environment
When you're actively developing on a given environment, this is the best way to deploy your changes. Note that when an environment is deployed for the first time, it will automatically update all modules as well. For subsequent updates only the environment itself will be updated.
Update a single environment and force an update of modules:
r10k deploy environment my_working_environment --puppetfile
This will update the given environment and update all contained modules. This is useful if you want to make sure that a given environment is fully up to date.
Update a single module across all environments:
r10k deploy module apache
This is useful for when you're working on a module specified in a Puppetfile and want to update it across all environments. See Puppetfile documentation for details on how this affects Forge vs. Git/SVN modules.
Update multiple modules across all environments:
r10k deploy module apache jenkins java
Update one or more modules in a single environment:
r10k deploy module -e production apache jenkins java
Display all environments being managed by r10k:
r10k deploy display
Display all environments being managed by r10k, and modules specified in the Puppetfile:
r10k deploy display -p
Display all environments being managed by r10k, and modules specified in the Puppetfile along with their expected and actual versions:
r10k deploy display -p --detail
Display an explicit list of environments being managed by r10k and modules specified in the Puppetfile along with their expected and actual versions:
r10k deploy display -p --detail production vmwr webrefactor
When running commands to deploy code on a master, r10k needs to have write
access to your Puppet environment path and should create files that are
readable by the user account running the master. If you're using Puppet
Enterprise this account is pe-puppet, and if you're using Puppet open source
this account is puppet.
This can be done in a few ways. First off, you can run r10k as the puppet user itself. You can also create a new user that has write access to the Puppet environment path, has the same GID as the puppet user, and has a umask of 0027. You can also run r10k as root, which is the simplest solution but does require access control to the root user.