Forklift provides tools to create Foreman/Katello environments for development, testing and production configurations. Whether you are a developer wanting an environment to write code, or a user wanting to spin up the latest production environment for deployment or evaluation Forklift has you covered.
- Using Forklift
- Production Environments
- Development Environments
- Stable Boxes
- Testing Environments
- Provisioning environment
- Plugins
- Using Forklift as a Library
- Troubleshooting
- Vagrant - 2.2+ - Both the VirtualBox and Libvirt providers are tested
- Ansible - 2.9+
- Vagrant Libvirt provider plugin (if using Libvirt)
- Virtualization enabled in BIOS
See Installing Vagrant for installation instructions.
This will walk through the simplest path of spinning up a production test environment of a bleeding edge nightly installation assuming Vagrant and Libvirt are installed and configured.
git clone https://github.com/theforeman/forklift.git
cd forklift
ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml
vagrant up centos7-foreman-nightly
The same can be quickly done for a development environment where GITHUB_NICK is your GitHub username:
git clone https://github.com/theforeman/forklift.git
cd forklift
cp vagrant/boxes.d/99-local.yaml.example vagrant/boxes.d/99-local.yaml
sed -i.bak "s/<REPLACE ME>/GITHUB_NICK/g" vagrant/boxes.d/99-local.yaml
vagrant up centos7-katello-devel
In case using vagrant is not desired, ansible playbooks and roles from this repo can be used separately. This is useful if an existing host should be used for the installation, e.g. a beaker machine. In order to deploy the devel environment on host test.example.com, the following needs to be done:
on test.example.com machine, where the dev env should be deployed
useradd vagrant
echo "vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers`in forklift checkout
echo "[devel]\ntest.example.com" > inventories/local_inventory
ansible-playbook --private-key=~/.ssh/id_rsa --user root --inventory inventories/local_inventory --extra-vars katello_devel_github_username=katello playbooks/devel.ymlIn an example above, ansible was instructed to use specific private key (overriding the value from ansible.cfg), root user was set as ssh user and playbook variable was set, so that checkout will be made from katello user.
Other playbooks from playbooks/ directory can be used similarly, though some might need more variables and investigating their parameters is recommended first.
More thorough guides can be found in the docs folder.
By default forklift deploys Foreman with admin/changeme as username and password, please change this on production installs (either after the install, or by setting foreman_installer_admin_password during the initial deployment).
For the multi-host setup, one of the easiest way of making the name resolution working with vagrant is using vagrant-hostmanager. Forklift supports this plugin by default. The only thing one needs to do is install the vagrant-hostmanager plugin:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager
By default, the boxes are set with example.com domain.
If you're using NetworkManager, this advanced DNS configuration allows completely automated dns resolution using dnsmasq from host to guest and guest to guest.
You can disable hostmanager in vagrant/settings.yaml by setting hostmanager_enabled option.
When using a briged network or with multiple network interfaces, the hostmanager would resolve the internal ip from the ssh-info, you can choose an ip of a particular network interface in vagrant/settings.yaml by setting hostmanager_ip_resolver_device option with the device name.
hostmanager_ip_resolver_device: 'eth1'Sometimes you want to spin up the same box type (e.g. centos7-katello-devel) from within the forklift directory. While this can be added to the Vagrantfile directly, updates to the forklift repository could wipe out your local changes. To help with this, you can define a custom box re-using the configuration within the Vagrantfile. To do so, create a 99-local.yaml file in vagrant/boxes.d/. For example, to create a custom box on CentOS 7 with nightly and run the installers reset command:
my-nightly-koji:
box: centos7
ansible:
playbook: playbooks/katello.yml
variables:
katello_repositories_environment: staging
verbose: vvv
Options:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| box | the ':name' one of the defined boxes in the Vagrantfile |
| bridged | deploy on Libvirt with a bridged networking configuration, value of this parameter should be the interface of the host (e.g. em1) |
| memory | set the amount of memory (in megabytes) this box will consume |
| cpus | set the number of cpus this box will use |
| hostname | hostname to set on the box |
| networks | custom networks to use in addition to the management network |
| disk_size | specify the size (in gigabytes) of the box's virtual disk. This only sets the virtual disk size, so you will still need to resize partitions and filesystems manually. |
| add_disks | (libvirt provider only) specify additional libvirt volumes |
| ansible | updates the Ansible provisioner configuration including the playbook to be ran or any variables to set |
| libvirt_options | sets Libvirt specific options, see config.rb from vagrant-libvirt for possible options |
| virtualbox_options | sets VirtualBox specific options |
| rackspace_options | sets Rackspace specific options |
| openstack_options | sets OpenStack specific options |
| google_options | sets Google specific options |
| docker_options | sets Docker specific options |
| domain | forklift uses short name of your host + 'example.com' as domain name for your boxes. You can use this option to override it. |
| sshfs | if you have vagrant-sshfs plugin, you can use sshfs to share folders between your host and guest. See an example below for details. |
| nfs | share folders between host and guest. See an example below for details. |
| autostart | set to true to automatically start when using 'vagrant up' |
| primary | set the machine to be the default target of vagrant commands such as 'vagrant ssh' |
| libvirt_qemu_use_session | Use qemu session instead of system |
Entirely new boxes can be created that do not orginate from a box defined within the Vagrantfile. For example, if you had access to a RHEL Vagrant box:
rhel7:
box_name: rhel7
shell: 'echo TEST'
pty: true
libvirt: http://example.org/vagrant/rhel-7.box
Example with custom networking, static IP on custom libvirt network:
static:
box: centos7
hostname: mystatic.box.com
networks:
- type: 'private_network'
options:
ip: 192.168.150.3
libvirt__network_name: lab-private
libvirt__iface_name: vnet2
Example with custom libvirt management network:
static:
box: centos7
hostname: mystatic.box.com
libvirt_options:
management_network_address: 172.23.99.0/24
Example with openstack provider: You will need to install vagrant openstack provider. For more information click here. Do not forget to set openstack API credentials. To use openstack provider as default look here.
openstack-centos7:
image_name: 'Centos7'
username: 'centos' #root by default
hostname: 'john-doe'
openstack_flavor: 'm1.medium'
sync_type: 'disabled'
You will need to install vagrant-sshfs plugin. Make sure your host actually has sshfs installed. Example with sshfs mounting folder from guest to host:
with-sshfs:
box: centos7
sshfs:
host_path: '/some/host/path'
guest_path: '/some/guest/path'
reverse: True
If you want to mount in the opposite direction, just change reverse to False or remove it entirely.
Additonal options may be specified with using options.
with-sshfs-options:
box: centos7
sshfs:
host_path: '/some/host/path'
guest_path: '/some/guest/path'
options: '-o allow_other'
Example with an additional disk (libvirt volume) presented as /dev/vdb in the vm:
static:
box: centos7
hostname: mystatic.box.com
add_disks:
- size: 100GiB
device: vdb
type: qcow2
An alternative to SSHFS is to share the folders with NFS. It is slightly more work than SSHFS. See the Fedora developer documentation for information about how to configure an NFS server for Vagrant.
Then create your box:
with-nfs:
box: centos7
nfs:
host_path: '/some/host/path'
guest_path: '/some/guest/path'
Some settings can be customized for the entirety of the deployment by copying vagrant/settings.yaml.example to vagrant/settings.yaml and add, remove or updating:
- memory: Memory to give boxes by default unless specified by a box
- cpus: Number of CPUs to give boxes by default unless specified by a box
- scale_memory: Factor to multiply memory of boxes that specify an own value
- scale_cpus: Factor to multiply CPUs of boxes that specify an own value
- sync_type: type of sync to use for transfer to the Vagrant box
- mount_options: options for the vagrant-cachier plugin
- domain: domain for your hosts, you can override this per-box by configuring your box with a domain directly
- libvirt_options, virtualbox_options, rackspace_options, openstack_options, google_options: custom options for the various providers
The list of available boxes can be customized by setting an exclude list in vagrant/settings.yaml. This allows faster vagrant status calls as well as reducing the the scope of boxes a user sees to tailor to their use cases. To specify boxes to exclude add the following to vagrant/settings.yaml, for example, to remove fips, fedora and any Foreman 1.2X boxes from view:
boxes:
exclude:
- "katello" # exclude any box containing "katello"
- "ubuntu1804-foreman-2\\.0" # exclude only the box "ubuntu1804-foreman-2.0". Notice the escaped '.' character to match the specific character instead of any single character
- "^centos7-fips" # exclude any box that starts with "centos7-fips"
- "foreman-1\\.(?:[2][0-3])" # exclude any foreman-1.20 to foreman-1.23 version box
Boxes can be further customized by declaring Ansible playbooks to be run during provisioning. One or more playbooks can be specified and will be executed sequentially. An ignored directory can be used to put playbooks into 'user_playbooks' without worrying about adding them during a git commit.
Ansible roles may also be installed directly using the ansible-galaxy command. These roles will be installed at playbooks/galaxy_roles and will be ignored by git. You may also specify roles in a requirements.yml, which you can use to install all desired roles with ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
ansible:
box: centos7-katello-nightly
ansible:
playbook:
- 'user_playbooks/vim.yml'
- 'user_playbooks/zsh.yml'
If needing to use a local copy of an Ansible collection used by Forklift, such as developing updates to theforeman.operations collection, you can temporarily update the requirements.yml to point at your local checkout:
collections:
- name: git+file:///home/user/path/to/repo/.git
type: git
Then run ansible-galaxy install:
ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml --force