Forklift: lifting Foreman into your environment

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
  • Requirements
  • Quickstart
  • Poor man's DNS a.k.a /etc/hosts
  • Adding Custom Boxes
  • Customize Deployment Settings
  • Post Install Playbooks
• Production Environments
• Development Environments
• Stable Boxes
• Testing Environments
• Provisioning environment
• Plugins
• Using Forklift as a Library
• Troubleshooting

Using Forklift

Requirements

• Vagrant - 2.2+ - Both the VirtualBox and Libvirt providers are tested
• Ansible - 2.7+
• Vagrant Libvirt provider plugin (if using Libvirt)
• Virtualization enabled in BIOS

See Installing Vagrant for installation instructions.

Quickstart

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
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.yml

In 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.

Credentials

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).

Poor man's DNS a.k.a /etc/hosts

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'

Adding Custom Boxes

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:

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'

Using SSHFS to share folders

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

Using NFS to share folders

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'

Customize Deployment Settings

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

Customize Available Boxes

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

Post Install Playbooks

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'