Foreman

Foreman is open-source server lifecycle management software, self-hosted by sysadmins who provision physical and virtual hosts and run Puppet or Ansible.

Foreman takes a server from bare metal or an empty virtual machine to a configured, monitored host, and keeps a record of it from then on. It answers the problem of many hosts that need the same setup and an account of every change made to them. The Foreman Project builds it as an open-source community with no owning company. Red Hat sponsors the project with build servers and full-time developers. Provisioning builds hosts on bare metal and through compute resources for Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, VMware, oVirt and Libvirt. For configuration, Foreman acts as an external node classifier for Puppet and Salt, with hiera-like parameters set per host or host group. It also runs Ansible roles and playbooks, including Check Mode runs that change nothing on the host. Reports show what happened on each node, and the dashboard separates healthy hosts from outdated ones. OpenSCAP policies scan hosts against standards such as DISA STIG and PCI DSS, while the audit system records how, who and when for every change. Foreman is built for system administrators and infrastructure teams who run their own servers, on premises or in the cloud. It fits organisations that already configure hosts with Puppet, Ansible or Salt and want provisioning and configuration in one console. Role-based access control lets a larger team split the work, with each user limited to the hosts and actions their role allows. Teams install, upgrade and operate the server themselves, and help comes from the community forum and Matrix chat. A common job is building a batch of new hosts from one host group, so each arrives with the same operating system, Puppet classes and parameters. Operators then read the configuration reports for failures and drift, and send Ansible jobs to the hosts that need a fix. Hammer CLI and the RESTful API give scripts the same reach, from registering hosts to assigning roles to users. Plugins such as Katello extend the server further, and users can sign in through LDAP or FreeIPA. Foreman suits teams who rebuild and reconfigure servers often and need every host to match its group.