Welcome back to the Foreman Newsletter! We kinda slipped up in January, sorry about that, but we’re back with 2 months of news, gossip, and releases for you!
Changes in the community team
At the start of February, I made the difficult decision to step down as community manager. It’s been an honour and a delight to help shape this community over the last few years, and to just be a part of it before that. You can read more about my (our?) history in the dedicated blog post
We can’t, however, leave the community without a community lead, and so there has been some other changes to address this. I’m delighted to announce that Ori Rabin is taking over as community lead and Rahul Bajaj is joining the team, as well - read his introduction post.
I’m certain that along with Tomer, the new community team is ready to take Foreman on to bigger and better things!
1.21 Released (and RCs for Katello 3.11 too)!
Work on 1.21 has been progressing steadily while we’ve all been away having fun at conferences - credit to the release team for their dedication! As of right now Foreman 1.21 is available, so get installing! This release brings the Organizations and Locations feature to everyone, so please do check the upgrade notes. You also get a new diff viewer and a ton of performance and stability fixes.
As ever, let us know your experiences. If you find issues, please do report them or [discuss on the forum][forum]. Details can be found in the release announcement.
Alongside the Foreman release, the Katello team have also released the first release candidates for the accompanying upgrade to Katello. We need just as much help testing Katello as Foreman itself, so if you’re a user … well, you know the drill - do report issues or again, head to the forum.
As ever, many thanks to the contributors to these releases - coders, RC testers, documentation writers, and bug/feature reporters. Foreman wouldn’t be what it is without you!
Foreman 1.20.2 bug fix release
In addition to the work on 1.21 we do of course maintain the stable version, and the next release of 1.20 is now available. This contains fixes for 16 issues found in the 1.20.1 release, mostly related to the templating engine rewrite and packaging.
Notable RFCs
Marek has a proposal for a different way to install and maintain Foreman:
- https://community.theforeman.org/t/rfc-make-foreman-easy-to-deploy-and-maintain/12804
Also, Tomer would like to know if anyone is using our ARM package builds for Foreman - you can chime in here:
- https://community.theforeman.org/t/dropping-arm-packages/12941
Conference roundup
As ever, Foreman was present at DevConf.CZ, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp this year, and as usual had a hackday in Gent as well. This year was as busy as ever, with lots of traffic at the booths, lots of hats given out (wow, they were popular in the Brussels snowstorm…), and a great set of talks in our track at CfgMgmtCamp. This year was also notable for the increased number of talks about Foreman (or dependencies like Obal) that we had in other tracks.
The dinner and the hackday were notable successes this year, with both getting over 30 people attending. It’s wonderful to see the community growing year-on-year - keep it going!
Community Survey analysis coming soon
Thanks to everyone who filled out this year’s community survey - we have now closed the form. We had 117 replies, which is a little down on last year, but still more than enough to work with. As usual, I have a dedicated blog post out for the analysis once I’m done with it.
Upcoming Events
All Foreman events are available via the forum calendar - hit the Subscribe button (which will give you an ICS link). You can also use the “Add To Calendar” button on specific events if you don’t wish to import the whole thing.
All the usual goodness from the community, rounded up and presented for your viewing pleasure.
Wim gave a great talk at CfgMgmtCamp about this, and he’s agreed to repeat it for us on our channel! Here’s his abstract:
Management of Katello can be challenging: there are just so many components to take care of! Configuration is often changed manually (via the webui or using hammer), and I wanted to investigate if its possible to apply a ‘regular config management’ workflow to Katello. Using cloud-init, forklift and foreman-ansible-modules, we’re able to quickly spawn up a fully customized Katello instance (and schedule regular executions of the playbooks using AWX)
Pune Ruby Meetup consists of a group of enthusiastic and creative Rubyists. Rahul and Aditi from the Foreman community will both be there so this is a good chance to do some contributing, especially if you’re new to it!
Newcomer to Foreman, wanting some getting started help? Maybe looking for some tips to get the best out of your existing install? Or perhaps wanting to start contributing? This is the place :)
Past Events
New Foreman user @mason and myself grabbed some time to look at Foreman & Katello from the perspective of a new user. We covered getting provisioning working (and the long list of things you have to check if it’s not working), applying Puppet classes, and architectural design such as the intentions behind the Foreman Proxy, where the responsibilities of Puppet and Foreman align, and more. It’s long, but well worth a watch!
Updates on settings being dropped in 1.21, raw script output in REX, and an awesome new diff viewer for config reports!
Lukas introduces us to the new Foreman Proxy v2 “capabilities” API, which is going to be really powerful in the future!
Myself and Tomer repeat the “State of the Community” talk from CfgMgmgtCamp, where we discuss the year to date, and the plans for the future. I also give my closing thoughts on 4 years as the Community Lead.
Plugin news
Updated plugins:
- foreman_ansible updated to 2.3.1
- foreman_discovery updated to 14.0.1
- foreman_maintain updated to 0.3.1
- foreman_openscap updated to 0.11.4
- foreman_ovirt_provisioning_plugin updated to 2.0.3
- foreman_remote_execution updated to 1.7.0
- foreman_scc_manager updated to 1.6.0
- foreman_tasks updated to 0.15.0
- foreman_virt_who_configure updated to 0.3.2
- foreman_wreckingball updated to 3.2.0
- foreman-xen updated to 0.7.1
- hammer_cli_foreman updated to 0.1.2
- hammer_cli_foreman updated to 0.16.0
- hammer_cli updated to 0.16.0
- hammer_cli_katello updated to 0.18
- katello-host-tools updated to 3.4.2
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, meetups and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!