Running a plan fails on Windows nodes, but succeeds on other nodes with a "No such file or directory error" in Puppet Enterprise

Running a plan fails on Windows nodes. The same plan runs without issues on Linux nodes.

Error messages

An error similar to the following:

{
  "msg" : "Exited 1:\nC:/Program Files/Puppet Labs/Puppet/puppet/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/puppet/configurer/downloader.rb:21:in `block in evaluate': Failed to retrieve plugin: change from 'absent' to 'file' failed: Could not set 'file' on ensure: No such file or directory - A directory component in C:/ProgramData/PuppetLabs/pxp-agent/tasks-cache/rotating_creds/plugins/puppet_x/dsc_resources/OfficeOnlineServerDsc/DSCResources/MSFT_OfficeOnlineServerInstallLanguagePack/MSFT_OfficeOnlineServerInstallLanguagePack.schema.mof20221104-1460-5ojufd.lock does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link

The directory (the path ending in *.lock) in the error has a path name longer than 260 characters, which is longer than the MAXPATH setting in Windows allows.

Version and installation information

PE version: All supported
OS: Windows

Solution

To fix the issue for existing Windows nodes, set HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled to 1 in the Windows Registry.

To prevent the issue, for new nodes that you’re adding, set HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled to 1 in the Windows Registry for each new node, and enable long paths when installing via the .msi package by setting the ENABLE_LONG_PATHS property. For example:

msiexec /qn /norestart /i puppet.msi ENABLE_LONG_PATHS =TRUE

Learn more about MSI properties that you can set from our documentation.