Foreman Free CMDB Software
Deploy, Configure, And Track Change With Free CMDB Software
Automate repetitive tasks With Foreman. This remote server administration tool offers multiple interfaces for interaction such as RESTf API, Web UI, and CLI.
Overview
Foreman is a free open source IT automation software for offices, data centers, and multiple other locations. It facilitates administrators to manage the whole IT infrastructure. Further, this digital asset management solution provides facilities for setting up new servers, configuration management, and tracking change. There is support for popular change and configuration management software such as Puppet, Salt, Ansible, and Chef. In fact, this open source CMDB software offers multiple interfaces for interaction and it includes REST API, CLI, and web user interface. Users can manage physical as well as virtual servers.
This free CMDB software offers reporting capabilities of machines and their configurations. Above all, users can generate custom reports using pre-defined reporting templates. However, it is easy to set up, and built on top of the plugin-based architecture. In addition, there is a complete ecosystem for managing the inventory of managed servers and networks. Moreover, Foreman provides an intuitive dashboard with widgets and stats.
This open source IT automation software is highly extensible and provides integrations with third-party applications. Therefore, Foreman is mainly written in Ruby along with the input from other languages such as JavaScript, HTML, and Python.
System Requirements
Requirements to setup Foreman include:
- Red Hat / centOS / Ubuntu
- Ruby 2.5 or newer
- NodeJS 10 or newer
- NPM 3.0 or newer
Features
Foreman has an excellent feature list and some of them are:
- Open Source
- Extensible
- Physical/Virtual Asset Management
- Cross-Platform
- RESTful Interface
- CLI
- Intuitive Dashboard
- Reporting
- Pluggins
- Monitoring
Installation
Once you have installed the pre-requisites, run the following commands to install all required packages:
yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"
yum -y install gcc-c++ git ruby ruby-devel rubygems \ libvirt-devel postgresql-devel openssl-devel \ libxml2-devel libxslt-devel zlib-devel \ readline-devel systemd-devel tar nodejs npm libcurl-devel
It is important that config/database.yml is set to use the correct database in the “production” block.
Now, run the following command to clone the source code:
git clone https://github.com/theforeman/foreman.git -b develop
After that, run these commands for the configurations:
cp config/settings.yaml.example config/settings.yaml
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
gem install bundler
Then, run the following command to install dependencies:
bundle install --without development test --path vendor
npm install
Following commands will set up database schema:
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:seed assets:precompile locale:pack webpack:compile
Finally, you can run the application using the following command:
./bin/rails s -e production
FAQs
What is Foreman used for?
Foreman is an open source software for managing physical/virtual servers. This free change and configuration management software offers configuration management software along with multiple user interfaces such as REST API, web UI and CLI.
Is Foreman free?
Foreman is a free self-hosted software used to automate several tasks such as application deployment, configuration management and monitoring.
What is Foreman Katello?
Katello is a popular plugin built for Foreman that provides content management and provisioning capabilities. It lets users sync remote repositories to build a library of contnet that helps in making custom build of the content.
Is Foreman open source?
Foreman is an open source remote server administration tool. The source code of this application is available on Github.
Does Foreman require puppet?
Yes, Foreman installer requires Puppet (4 or later).
