Installing Foreman on CentOS 7 / Debian 8

Foreman provides a feature rich frontend for Puppet - that allows you to easily deploy, manage and monitor your puppet infrastructure.

Note: It is highly recommended that you use the official Puppet packages from the official Puppet repository when using t in conjunction with Foreman.

So - lets firstly add the Foreman repository with:

yum install epel-release http://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.7/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm

yum -y install foreman-installer

or for Debian 8:

echo "deb http://deb.theforeman.org/ jessie 1.13" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/foreman.list
echo "deb http://deb.theforeman.org/ plugins 1.13" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/foreman.list
apt-get -y install ca-certificates
wget -q https://deb.theforeman.org/pubkey.gpg -O- | apt-key add -

apt-get update && apt-get -y install foreman-installer

and then run the installer with:

foreman-installer

I got a few errors during the initial install:

"Error: Removing mount files: /etc/puppet/files does not exist"

and

'Error executing SQL; psql returned pid 1842 exit 1: 'ERROR:  invalid locale name: "en_US.utf8"'

In order to resolve the above problem we should generate en_US.utf8 locale - in Debian we run:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

and ensure 'en_US.utf8' is selected.

Uninstall foreman with:

sudo apt-get --purge remove foreman foreman-installer foreman-proxy
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/foreman /usr/share/foreman /usr/share/foreman-proxy/logs
sudo rm -R /etc/apache2/conf.d/foreman*

and attempt to reinstall:

foreman-installer

Review the logs at /var/log/foreman/install.log for any problems:

cat /var/log/foreman/install.log | grep ERROR

and launch the web app:

https://hostname

The defualt login details are supposedly: admin / changeme - but this didn't seem to be the case for myself - so I ended up manually resetting the password in the console with:

foreman-rake permissions:reset

Initially we will want to import all of our puppet classes - this can be performed by going to:

Configure >> Classes and then click on 'Import classes from puppet.xyz.com'