Heads up: Community templates repo will be archived tomorrow!

tbrisker · July 8, 2020, 9:26am

Following the long discussion in Provisioning Templates / Testing & Separate Repository, and now that 2.1 has been released, I will be archiving the community templates repository tomorrow.

How should changes to templates be handled going forward?

Provisioning templates, partition tables and report templates will all live in Foreman core repository, under app/views/unattended folder. PRs can be submitted normally to develop branch as well as to stable branches when needed for backports. Note that from now we will require redmine issues for all changes, as this will allow us to better control what template changes have been released in each version of Foreman. If the template change leads to change in the snapshot, rake snapshots:generate RAILS_ENV=test can be used to update the snapshot accordingly.
Remote execution job templates will reside in either the Remote Execution plugin for generic ssh templates, or in another plugin that adds them. For example, templates for the Ansible REX provider will reside in the Ansible plugin, while templates for Katello actions will reside in the Katello plugin.

tbrisker · July 9, 2020, 2:07pm

The repo has now been archived.

Amardeep_Kahali · July 9, 2020, 2:45pm

@tbrisker does PRs for provisioning templates also need to follow these guidelines? Foreman :: Contribute

tbrisker · July 12, 2020, 7:45am

In general, yes.
You don’t usually need to run all of the tests, but if snapshots change you will need to update the snapshot accordingly.
Also, you will need to make sure that every change has a redmine issue related to it. In the past we’ve had issues where changes in the community templates which did not have an issue led to problems and it was difficult to identify when the change was made, or when we wanted to pull some fix to an older release but had trouble with identifying which change was needed or only realized it at a very late stage in the release cycle.
This way nightly builds will also contain the latest templates so they can be tested right away and not only when a new release is done.

illumino · April 17, 2021, 1:50am

Note: The v2.4 manual Section 4.4.3 still references the community templates repository, in the last sentence of paragraph two - This sentence should be removed or updated to reflect the archiving of that repo.

tbrisker · April 18, 2021, 7:22am

Thanks for noticing this! would you consider opening a Pull Request to fix the issue? the manual source code is for the relevant section is at

github.com

theforeman/theforeman.org/blob/gh-pages/_includes/manuals/nightly/4.4.3_prov_templates.md


The Provision Templates is the core of Foreman's flexibility to deploy the right OS with the right options. There are several types of template, along with a flexible matching system to deliver different templates to different Hosts.

Foreman comes with pre-created templates for the more common OSs, but you will need to review these. All these templates are locked by default, hence they can not be modified. Most of them are customizable through parameters, but if you need some custom functionality, the recommended workflow is to clone the template and edit the clone. You can unlock the pre-created template and edit it directly, but note that any custom change will be overridden on any Foreman update. If you believe your change is worth of including in next Foreman release, please consider sending a patch to [community-templates repository](https://github.com/theforeman/community-templates) which we regularly synchronize with our codebase.

#### Template Kinds

There are several template kinds:

* PXELinux, PXEGrub, PXEGrub2  - Deployed to the TFTP server to ensure the Host boots the correct installer with the correct kernel options (also referred to as PXE templates)
* Provision - The main unattended installation file; e.g. Kickstart or Preseed
* Finish    - A post-install script used to take custom actions after the main provisioning is complete
* user_data - Similar to a Finish script, this can be assigned to hosts built on user_data-capable images (e.g. Openstack, EC2, etc)
* Script    - An arbitrary script, not used by default, useful for certain custom tasks
* iPXE      - Used in {g,i}PXE environments in place of PXELinux (do not confuse with PXE templates above)

In practice, most environments only make use of the first 3. The *Create Host* action deploys the PXELinux template to the TFTP server. The PXELinux template directs the host to retrieve the Provision template. The Provision template will direct the installer to retrieve and run the Finish template at the end of the install, and the Finish template will notify Foreman the build is complete just before reboot.

##### Editing Templates

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illumino · April 18, 2021, 7:56am

Tomer,

I don’t mind doing the work, but what should I say? Looking at your original message and github, it would seem to be that the entirety of your post would be required starting at “How should changes …”. So should the page’s text be changed to reference this post in the development forum?

I this correct, or have I missed something? Should I copy out the entire relevant text from your post, which seems to me, to be excessive details for the target page! Did that text come from a development page that would be a better long term reference?

I hope you can see why I didn’t just jump in with a suggested change, because I didn’t and don’t know the answer to the questions raised which would provide a valuable revision, worth the time of those that would have to review it.

Regards,
Peter

tbrisker · April 18, 2021, 2:21pm

Thanks @illumino, I would suggest to modify the link to point to the relevant place on the foreman repo (app/views/unattended) and drop the part about it being synced, and maybe add a pointer to the contributing guidelines.

illumino · April 19, 2021, 2:34am

Completed, I hope its meets with your expectations.