Installation

CLI

Download and extract the CLI for your architecture and try to connect to controller:

forester-cli --url http://forester:8000 appliance list

If the service is running on localhost port 8000, you can omit the --url argument.

Service

The recommended way is Podman pod.

Podman pod

The following commands create two new volumes for postgres database and images, a new pod named forester with two containers named forester-pg and forester-api exposing port 8000 for the REST API and files.

podman volume create forester-pg
podman volume create forester-img
podman volume create forester-log
podman pod create --name forester -p 8000:8000 -p 8514:8514
podman run -d --name forester-pg --pod forester \
    -e POSTGRESQL_USER=forester -e POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD=forester -e POSTGRESQL_DATABASE=forester \
    -v forester-pg:/var/lib/pgsql/data:Z quay.io/fedora/postgresql-15; sleep 5s
podman run -d --name forester-api --pod forester \
    -e DATABASE_USER=forester -e DATABASE_PASSWORD=forester \
    -v forester-img:/images:Z -v forester-log:/logs:Z quay.io/forester/controller:latest

TFTP service, which is required for PXE, must be started separately with --network host option. Since the service port is lower than 1024, it must be executed as root or unprivileged port boundary can be configured:

sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start=69

To start the TFTP-HTTP proxy which will proxy TFTP downloads to http://localhost:8000 by default (configurable via options):

podman run -d --name forester-proxy --network host quay.io/forester/controller:latest /forester-proxy --verbose

In order for TFTP to work through NAT, connection tracking modules must be loaded too:

sudo modprobe nf_conntrack_tftp
sudo modprobe nf_nat_tftp

To make both changes permanent on Fedora or Red Hat system:

echo "net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start=69" > /etc/sysctl.d/10-unprivileged_ports.conf
echo "install nf_conntrack_tftp" > /etc/modprobe.d/tftp.conf
echo "install nf_nat_tftp" >> /etc/modprobe.d/tftp.conf

To uninstall everything up including data and images:

podman rm -f forester-pg forester-app
podman pod rm -f forester
podman volume rm forester-img forester-pg

Docker compose

To start the Forester via docker-compose or podman-compose:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/foresterorg/forester/main/compose.yaml > compose.yaml
docker-compose up -d

Compiling from source

Compilation is described in the Contributing chapter.