Quickstart Guide

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

Components include the Foreman web UI, Smart Proxy, Passenger (for the puppet master and Foreman itself), and optionally TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers. It is configurable and the Puppet modules can be read or run in “no-op” mode to see what changes it will make.

Supported platforms

RHEL derivatives (CentOS), version 6 (EPEL required, plus subscribe to “optional” channel on RHEL 6)
Fedora 18, 19
Debian 7 (Wheezy)
Debian 6 (Squeeze) (update Puppet from backports)
Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise)

Other operating systems will need to use alternative installation methods (see the manual).

Installation

The Foreman installer uses Puppet to install Foreman. This guide assumes that you’ve already installed Puppet (without a master), but the installer will setup Foreman and the puppet master with Passenger and the Smart Proxy by default.

Downloading the installer

For Red Hat variants, run this (replace ‘el6’ with ‘f18’ or ‘f19’ as appropriate):

yum -y install http://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.2/el6/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm
yum -y install foreman-installer

For Debian variants, run this (replace ‘wheezy’ with ‘precise’ if on Ubuntu 12.04, or ‘squeeze’ for Debian 6):

echo "deb http://deb.theforeman.org/ wheezy stable" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/foreman.list
wget -q http://deb.theforeman.org/pubkey.gpg -O- | apt-key add -
apt-get update && apt-get install foreman-installer

Running the installer

The procedure is initially interactive, allowing changes to the configuration and then the option is given to run Puppet to perform the installation:

ruby /usr/share/foreman-installer/generate_answers.rb

After Puppet runs, Foreman will be accessible at https://fqdn/ with a default username/password of “admin” and “changeme”. To complete the installation, click on More > Configuration > Smart Proxies and add a new proxy with the URL https://fqdn:8443/.

More quickstart resources…

Continue reading the quickstart guide in the manual:

Quickstart: Puppet management

Or view the quickstart screencasts:

Quickstart screencasts