Upstream Foreman has had an update and now moved to a new major version, time to take a quick look at what is different with this Foreman. I am testing this on CentOS 7.8 with the latest updates as of today.

Here’s the offical release notes for Foreman 2.0
Here’s the offical Quick Start guide to install Foreman 2.0

Here’s a quick copy and paste to get you started

yum update -y
yum install epel-release -y
yum -y install https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/2.0/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm
yum -y install https://yum.puppet.com/puppet6-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
yum -y install foreman-release-scl
yum -y install foreman-installer

Make sure to add in /etc/hosts your FQDN if you do not have an external DNS configured.

[root@foreman2 ~]# cat /etc/hosts
192.168.1.149 foreman2.local.lab.net foreman2
127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

Run the installer and hopefully you get the Success message with the login and password.

foreman-installer
Preparing installation Done                                              
  Success!
  * Foreman is running at https://foreman2.local.lab.net
      Initial credentials are admin / XXXXXX
  * Foreman Proxy is running at https://foreman2.local.lab.net:8443
  The full log is at /var/log/foreman-installer/foreman.log

Open up the firewall por

firewall-cmd --add-port=8443/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

Looks like the login GUI has changed compared to previous version, similar to what we see on Satellite 6.7 now as well.

Once you login, everything else looks to be the same from previous versions of Foreman. A lot of the changes seem to be under the hood, particularly with the databases which is a good indication of what a future Red Hat Satellite release will be using. This was the biggest giveaway in the release notes:

“Starting with Foreman 2.0, we are consolidating on PostgreSQL as the only supported database. RPM based installations will also upgrade PostgreSQL to use version 12 from SCL instead of the default version 9.2 shipped in EL7 repositories. Katello 3.15, that will be released for compatibility with 2.0, will also start the migration to using the PostgreSQL-based Pulp 3. Initially file and container content types will be switched to Pulp 3 followed by more types in future releases. This means that Katello users will eventually enjoy a single database instead of needing to manage multiple ones (as Pulp 2 is based on MongoDB). For MySQL users, there are migration instruction in the 1.24 manual. Note that this migration must be done prior to upgrading to Foreman 2.0.”

This does seem to sound that MongoDB will no longer be part of Red Hat Satellite which is used by Pulp with the migration to Pulp 3. One less house keeping job to do which should be done every few months and that is the MongoDB repair clean up.

Just a quick blog about how to install Foreman 2.0, it’s fairly easy to get up and running with minimal resources required. I have this running on a VM with 20GB storage x1 vCPU and x4GB vRAM and it doesn’t seem to miss a beat.