It’s been a busy month (or so) since the last newsletter. Here’s a round up of what’s new….
1.11.2 released
The latest stable release of Foreman has been updated to 1.11.2 with a heap of bug fixes and a security fix too. More details on the mailing list and in the release notes. Thanks to all who contributed bug reports and patches!
Foreman RFC system
We’ve formalised our method for proposing large-scale changes to Foreman, and we’ve chosen to do this using a separate Github repo. Proposing RFCs as PRs gives us the complete history of the PR, including all the comments that were made as the RFC evolved from first proposal to eventual acceptance (or not). For more of the thinking behind implementing this, see the mailing list discussion.
If the general direction of larger parts of Foreman is of interest to you, if you have an RFC of your own, or you just want to read up on the process itself, head over to the rfc repo.
We’ll be reviewing how well this works for us in a few months, but already we have a few RFCs which are gathering comments.
Foreman Events Page
The Foreman website now has it’s own calendar! You can head to [http://theforeman/events][/events] to see all the upcoming things happening in & around Foreman. This page also has an ICS link which you can add to your own calendar system to automatically keep up-to-date with new events.
The events system is powered by a simple YAML file in our Github repo so if you’re attending or organising a Foreman event, or speaking about Foreman somewhere, do send us a patch to add your event!
NETWAYS Foreman Training Course donated
The lovely folks at NETWAYS have decided to release their Foreman training course to the Foreman community! You can find more details on how it happened here and here, and the actual training course here. Thanks NETWAYS!
Katello 3.0 RC4
The Katello 3.0 release train is rolling on, and we’re now up to RC4, with RC5 likely before the final release. As ever, if you have spare time to road-test our release candidates, then the increased quality of the release is hugely appreciated by the whole community. You can find out more at the RC4 release thread. Thanks for your help!
New media and blogs
Community demo on 28th April 2016
We held another community demo this month, in which we covered the usual community banter from me, some Remote Execution and Libvirt updates from Stephen and Lukas, and a lengthy chat with Dirk from NETWAYS regarding the new Foreman Community training course.
Case Study on Discovery and Custom UIs with MyHeritage
Another Case Study happened this month, and this time we chatted with Imri and Elad from MyHeritage about the additions they’ve contributed to Foreman Discovery, how they modified the UI to make a simple developer portal for launching VMs, and more. Thanks guys!
Deep Dive on Recent Smart Proxy updates
In another of our dives into the inner workings of Foreman, Dmitri Dolguikh (witlessb) gave us a look at recent changes to the smart-proxy core, using the changes to the puppet_proxy module needed for Puppet 4 support as an illustration.
Automating an R&D lab - Julien Pivotto, OSDC
Julien gave a great talk about how to use Foreman for automating an entire lab at OSDC - this is definitely worth watching. Thanks Julien!
Satellite 6.2 Beta released
For those following the downstream releases as well as upstream ones, Satellite 6.2 Beta is now available for download.
Upcoming events
Community Demo on 19th May 2016
The next Foreman Community Demo will be on Thursday. As ever, you can watch live and partcipate via the Q&A app or via IRC, or you can catch up later on YouTube and ask questions in the mailing list thread.
NETWAYS Foreman Webinar (German) on 20th May
NETWAYS are presenting a 1 hour webinar on Foreman and Puppet basics, in German, on Fri 20th May.
(All Foreman events are now available via the Foreman Calendar)
New plugins
- foreman-slack - New plugin for announcing host builds to a Slack channel, see the release thread for details.
- smart_proxy_dhcp_infoblox release to accompany the DNS Infoblox plugin from last month.
Updated plugins
- foreman_bootdisk updated to 8.0.0
- foreman-digitalocean updated to 1.0.0
- foreman_discovery image updated to 3.1
- foreman-docker updated to 2.1.1
- foreman_hooks updated to 0.3.10
- foreman_remote_execution updated to 0.3.2
- foreman-tasks updated to 0.7.17
- foreman_templates updated to 2.1.0
- hammer-cli-foreman-discovery updated to 0.0.3
- puppetdb_foreman updated to 1.0.3
- smart_proxy_dns_powerdns updated to 0.2.1
- smart_proxy_dns_route53 updated to 2.0.0
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!