How To Install Foreman on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 / Oracle Linux 7

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Foreman is an open source tool that helps you to provision, configure, manage and monitor the servers. With the help of configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Foreman’s smart proxy architecture, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage change.

Foreman provides comprehensive, interaction facilities including a web frontend, CLI and RESTful API which enables you to do the above tasks, supports both on-premise with VMs and bare-metal or in the cloud.

With Foreman, we can manage 10s to 10,000s of physical or virtual servers via a web browser.

Features

  • Discover, provision and upgrade your entire bare-metal infrastructure
  • Create and manage instances across private and public clouds
  • Group your hosts and manage them in bulk, regardless of location
  • Review historical changes for auditing or troubleshooting
  • Extend as needed via a robust plugin architecture
  • Automatically build images (on each platform) per system definition to optimize deployment

It can provision systems on bare metal (physical) as well as the following cloud providers,

  • Amazon EC2
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Libvirt
  • OpenStack
  • oVirt and RHEV
  • Rackspace
  • VMware

System Requirements

Supported Platforms

Foreman can be installed on following operating systems,

  • RHEL / CentOS / Fedora / Oracle Linux
  • Ubuntu / Debian
  • Solaris 8, 10
  • OpenSUSE / SLES
  • CoreOS
  • FreeBSD
  • Junos

Hardware Requirements

  • 4GB RAM
  • 2GB HDD Disk Space

Prerequisites

Before installing Foreman, make sure you have set up an FQDN for your server.

vi /etc/hosts

Make an entry, like this.

192.168.1.10 server.itzgeek.local server

Also, do not forget to setup the valid hostname for the above host entry.

hostnamectl set-hostname server.itzgeek.local

Install Foreman on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7

Foreman can be installed in different methods. The recommended way is with the puppet-based Foreman Installer, but you may also use your distribution’s package manager or install directly from the source.

The Foreman installer is a collection of Puppet modules that install everything required for a full working Foreman setup. It uses native OS packaging (e.g., RPM packages) and adds necessary configuration for the complete installation.

The Foreman installer will install the necessary components such as the Foreman web UI, Smart Proxy, Passenger (for the puppet master and Foreman itself), and optionally TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers.

First, configure EPEL, Puppet and Foreman repositories.

rpm -ivh https://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppet5/puppet5-release-el-7.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.20/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm

Enable the RHEL Optional repository (RHEL only).

yum-config-manager --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms

Run the following command to download Foreman installer.

yum -y install foreman-installer

Now, run the Foreman installer to start installing Foreman.

foreman-installer

The installation run is non-interactive, but the configuration can be customized by supplying any of the options listed in foreman-installer –help, or by running foreman-installer -i for interactive mode.

Once the installation is completed, you will see an output like below where you would find the initial username and password to access the Foreman.

Installing             Done                                               [100%] [................................]
  Success!
  * Foreman is running at https://server.itzgeek.local
      Initial credentials are admin / SdjdyHStak9vrB3r
  * Foreman Proxy is running at https://server.itzgeek.local:8443
  * Puppetmaster is running at port 8140
  The full log is at /var/log/foreman-installer/foreman.log

Note down initial username and password, and you would need this for accessing Foreman’s dashboard.

Firewall Configuration

The components of Foreman use the following ports and they need to be allowed in IP tables (FirewallD) / Hardware Firewall.

Port Protocol Required For
53 TCP & UDP DNS Server
67, 68 UDP DHCP Server
69 UDP * TFTP Server
80, 443 TCP * HTTP & HTTPS access to Foreman web UI – using Apache + Passenger
3000 TCP HTTP access to Foreman web UI – using standalone WEBrick service
3306 TCP Separate MySQL database
5910 – 5930 TCP Server VNC Consoles
5432 TCP Separate PostgreSQL database
8140 TCP * Puppet Master
8443 TCP Smart Proxy, open only to Foreman

Run following commands to allow above ports in FirewallD.

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=53/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=67-69/udp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=80/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=443/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=3000/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=3306/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=5910-5930/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=5432/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8140/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8443/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

Access Foreman Web Console

Open up your favorite web browser, navigate to

https://your.ip.addr.ess

OR

https://FQDN

Add an SSL exception in the browser to access the Foreman web console.

Install Foreman on CentOS 7 - Self-signed SSL Warning
Install Foreman on CentOS 7 – Self-signed SSL Warning

Log in with the username and password shown to you at the end of Foreman installation.

Install Foreman on CentOS 7 - Foreman Login Screen
Install Foreman on CentOS 7 – Foreman Login Screen

Once you logged in, you will get an overview page like below.

Install Foreman on CentOS 7 - Overview Page
Install Foreman on CentOS 7 – Overview Page

It is recommended to change the password of Admin user for security reasons. To do that, click <Username> (Top right) >> My Account.

Install Foreman on CentOS 7 - Change Foreman Admin Password
Install Foreman on CentOS 7 – Change Foreman Admin Password

To list down the available hosts, go to Hosts >> All Hosts from Menu.

Configure Foreman (Optional)

If your Foreman host is not visible in Hosts >> All Hosts tab, you should run below command which will send the first Puppet report to Foreman, automatically creating the host in Foreman’s database.

/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet agent --test

Output:

Info: Using configured environment 'production'
Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
Info: Retrieving plugin
Info: Retrieving locales
Info: Loading facts
Info: Caching catalog for server.itzgeek.local
Info: Applying configuration version '1543476534'
Notice: Applied catalog in 0.16 seconds

Puppet 3+ may show notice/warning during the first run, and this can be ignored.

Since we do not have any puppet clients, All Hosts tab would only list your Foreman host, with an “O” status and green tick mark. This indicates its status is OK, with no changes made in the last Puppet run.

Install Foreman on CentOS 7 - Hosts List
Install Foreman on CentOS 7 – Hosts List
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