We have a variety of communication tools that the Foreman Community uses to get work done. The guidelines below apply in general when interacting with other Foreman users & developers:
There are also a few extra medium-specific guidelines, listed with each type of support below.
Should you need to speak with someone about another Foreman member’s behaviour, email Greg Sutcliffe (greg at emeraldreverie.org, male) and/or Ori Rabin (orabin at redhat.com, female). We’ll do our best to listen to your issue fairly and take appropriate action.
To get appropriate support, you need to provide sufficient information about your operating system, environment and setup. You can utilize the foreman-debug tool - for more info see the manual.
The issue tracker (Redmine) should be used to check for existing issues or to file a new issue. First, find the project and then use the Issues tab to view bugs and feature requests. Use the search feature at the top of the issue list to filter by Category to narrow down the results.
When filing a new issue, check that the correct project is selected, then click the New Issue link in the header. Try to set the Category, Found in release and include as much information as possible, including log files and screenshots. For support requests, please use one of the other options below.
We use a Discourse forum for our community interactions. For help or support with Foreman problems, questions and answers or general discussion, post to the Support board:
users@community.theforeman.org
(account required)For discussions about developing Foreman or plugins, use the Development board:
dev@community.theforeman.org
(account required)There is also a low-traffic board dedicated to release and security announcements:
In addition to the general guidelines above, we also have a few forum-specific guidelines:
(Credit to the Fedora Mailing List Guidelines as a source of ideas, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)
A great place to get real-time help with The Foreman is our IRC channel:
There are usually many helpful people there in addition to some of the Foreman developers. For discussions about the intricacies of developing Foreman or plugins, use the development channel:
Please read and understand this fantastic guide to getting help for open-source projects on IRC before diving in. All of the points there apply to #theforeman, especially “Don’t repeat yourself”, “Don’t ask to ask”, and “Stick around”. #theforeman in particular has concentrations of people in Europe (CEST) and East-coast US (EST), so asking your question when those time zones are in business hours is more likely to get a good result.
Be aware that the IRC channel is not an official support channel, it’s an ad-hoc group of people (some of whom work on Foreman for a living) self-organizing to help each other out. If you do not receive an answer to your question, (especially if you have not followed the getting help on IRC best practices!), that doesn’t mean you are out of options; the software may have a bug, the docs may be lacking, or it’s possible Foreman doesn’t yet support your use case. It just means you need to keep troubleshooting to find out which.
In addition to the general guidelines above, we also have a few IRC-specific guidelines:
More information: This IRC primer for new users and the general IRC guidelines, from libera.chat, are also useful resources.
(Thanks to the Puppet Labs IRC Guidelines for the original document)
For those wanting something a little less “basic” than IRC, or just would like a persistent connection, you can also find us on Matrix.org
an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over IP. Matrix has many clients available, including browser-based, desktop & mobile apps, and even plugins for venerable clients like WeeChat. Our rooms are in the public directory, but for reference:
The Matrix rooms are bridged to the IRC channels, so we’re all in the same chat. Pick which you prefer!
Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We regularly upload deep dives on Foreman features, screencasts to learn how to use the different features and plugins of Foreman, discussions and much more.
Foreman 3.6.1 has been released! Follow the quick start to install it.
Foreman 3.5.3 has been released! Follow the quick start to install it.