Content & Tooling Team Status Update
Tags: puppet, community
Published: 2023-08-18 03:34:08

---
title: Content & Tooling Team Status Update
published: true
date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00 UTC
tags: puppet, community
canonical_url: https://puppetlabs.github.io/content-and-tooling-team/blog/updates/2023-08-04-status-update/
---

## Hello Again!!
Happy Friday everyone! Another great week done and dusted. As the size of the CaT team has increased, we have been able to start working on more projects simultaneously. We are now trying to give our Tools a bit more love,
both in action and representation, so the blogpost updates here onwards will be having 2 separate sections: one for our work on Modules and one for our work in Tools.

### Modules

## CI Improvements
Re-echoing what we have posted earlier on CI part. The Module Team working hard to stablize the CI pipelines, which will help us to deliver the change fast. So far the Team gone through all modules and the result also can be seen.

## ERB to EPP
The module team has been continuing work on the conversion of ERB templates to EPP, as EPP is native to Puppet and boasts huge performance increases. So far we have worked on [puppetlabs-haproxy][puppetlabs-haproxy], [puppetlabs-ntp][puppetlabs-ntp], [puppetlabs-mysql][puppetlabs-mysql] & [puppetlabs-tomcat][puppetlabs-tomcat] modules and we are continuing to roll this out to our full suite of supported modules.

## Firewall module
As some of you already know, we have been working on converting the Firewall module to utilise on the resource_api in an effort to increase the ease with which it can be managed and improved upon in the future. As part of this a range of improvements have been made including; the addition of strict types for all attributes, improved validation of input and some measure of increased functionality.
As it stands the core functionality of the change has been finished and a full range of acceptance testing has been implemented with the last of the needed work being to fully implement unit testing within the updated module.

### Tools

## Onboarding
As part of our current tool onboarding process, this week we have been working on pdk-vanagon, litmusimage and PuppetDSCBuilder. We are hoping to get a bit more familiar with these tools, solve some of the issues and merge as many PRs as we can.


## Community Contributions

We'd like to thank the following people in the Puppet Community for their contributions over this past week:

- [`puppetlabs-tomcat#536`][puppetlabs-tomcat-pr-536]: "Update var types", thanks to [Joris29][Joris29]
- [`pdk-templates#522`][pdk-templates-pr-522]: "(CONT-1119) Add puppet-strings", thanks to [chelnak][chelnak]

## New Module / Gem Releases

The following modules were released this week:

- [`puppetlabs-stdlib`][puppetlabs-stdlib] (`9.3.0`)
- [`puppet_litmus`][puppet_litmus] (`1.1.3`)

  [puppetlabs-stdlib]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-stdlib
  [puppetlabs-tomcat-pr-536]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-tomcat/pull/536
  [Joris29]: https://github.com/Joris29
  [chelnak]: https://github.com/chelnak
  [pdk-templates-pr-522]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/pdk-templates/pull/522
  [puppetlabs-haproxy]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-haproxy
  [puppetlabs-ntp]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-ntp
  [puppetlabs-mysql]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-mysql
  [puppetlabs-tomcat]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-tomcat
  [puppet_litmus]: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet_litmus