Foreman

Foreman is a front-end management system for Puppet, which in turn is a configuration management system for a wide variety of applications and operating systems.

https://theforeman.org/manuals/1.15/index.html contains installation instructions for Foreman, however there are few quirks which it's useful to know about before just following these and hoping they will work as advertised.

Firstly (at least under Debian and Ubuntu, almost certainly also under Devuan, and maybe others as well), the instructions will fail with a PostgreSQL error message if you do not have en_US.utf8 as one of your available system locales:

Error executing SQL; psql returned pid 22443 exit 1: 'ERROR:  invalid locale name: "en_US.utf8"

(plus quite a lot more output in red)

The instructions make no mention that if you don't have American as one of your system languages, you can't install foreman, but that's the way it is.

A successful run produces only the output:

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

Secondly (once you've managed to get foreman to install correctly and without reporting any errors) the instructions suggest that you run puppet agent --test on the machine running foreman.

This can take ages to run - with no output to start with, and then a total of about 6 lines of output appearing quite slowly once they've begun to appear.

So, don't assume that since there's no output appearing, nothing is happening, or there's a problem (although in my opinion no output for such a long time is in itself a problem - with the command and its user-feedback) - just wait and you should eventually get something like:

Info: Using configured environment 'production'
Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
Info: Retrieving plugin
Info: Caching catalog for <your.foreman.host.name>
Info: Applying configuration version '1508842245'
Notice: Applied catalog in 1.02 seconds

Note that even though the output reports something taking 1.02 seconds, the duration from running the command to getting a prompt back was in my case 100 seconds…

[Incidentally, the documentation states that "Puppet will show a warning the first time that the node can't be found, this can be ignored." Mine didn't.]

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