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OBS systemsmanagement:Agama:Staging
OBS systemsmanagement:Agama:Devel
Agama is a new Linux installer born in the core of the YaST team. It is designed to offer re-usability, integration with third party tools and the possibility of building advanced user interfaces over it.
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Note for developers: For updating the screenshots see the integration test documentation.
This new project follows two main motivations: to overcome some of the limitations of YaST and to serve as installer for new projects like SUSE ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform).
YaST is a mature installer and control center for SUSE and openSUSE operating systems. With more than 20 years behind it, YaST is a competent and flexible installer able to cover uncountable use cases. But time goes by, and the good old YaST is starting to show its age in some aspects:
- The architecture of YaST is complex and its code-base has too much technical debt.
- Designing and building rich and modern user interfaces is a real challenge.
- Sharing logic with other tools like Salt or Ansible is very difficult.
- Some in-house solutions like libyui makes more difficult to contribute to the project.
SUSE is working on its next generation operating system called ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform). ALP is designed to be a lean core system, moving most of the software and workloads to containers and virtual machines. For some cases, for example cloud and virtual machines, ALP based systems will be deployed with auto-installable images. But still there are quite some situations in which ALP must be installed in a more traditional way. A clear example consists on installing over bare metal where some system analysis is required beforehand. Agama is also intended to cover such use cases for ALP, offering a minimal but powerful installer able to support a wide range of scenarios (e.g., RAID, encryption, LVM, network storage, etc).
This project is designed as a service-client system, using a dedicated D-Bus server for process communication.
Agama consists on a set of D-Bus services, a web client and a command-line interface. The services use YaST-based libraries under the hood, reusing a lot logic already provided by YaST. Currently Agama comes with six separate services, although the list can increase in the future:
- Agama service: it is the main service which manages and controls the installation process.
- Software service: configures the product and software to install.
- Users service: manages first user creation and configuration for root.
- Localization service: allows to configure the language and keyboard settings.
- Storage service: analyzes and prepares the storage devices in order to perform the installation.
- Questions service: helper service used for requesting information from clients.
Agama offers a web interface and its UI process uses the Cockpit's infrastructure to communicate with the D-Bus services.
There are two ways of running this project: a) by using a Agama live ISO image or b) by cloning and configuring the project.
The easiest way to give Agama a try is to grab a live ISO image and boot it in a virtual machine. This is also the recommended way if you only want to play and see it in action. If you want to have a closer look, then clone and configure the project as explained in the next section.
There are two flavors of live ISO images:
- openSUSE: it can be used to install different openSUSE distributions, like Tumbleweed or Leap.
- ALP: it allows to install the development version of SUSE ALP Dolomite.
You can download them from the openSUSE Build Service.
- Make sure to download the correct ISO file according to your system architecture (eg.
you would need to choose a file including
x86_64if you use an Intel or AMD 64-bit processor) and according to the system you want to install (openSUSE vs ALP).
The Live ISO is configured to use mDNS (sometimes called Avahi, Zeroconf, Bonjour) for hostname resolution. The reason is that it might be quite difficult to find out which URL should be used for connecting to a running Agama installer.
Do not use the .local hostnames in untrusted networks (like public WiFi
networks, shared networks), it is a security risk. An attacker can easily send
malicious responses for the .local hostname resolutions and point you to a
wrong Agama instance which could for example steal your root password!
If you cannot connect to a server using the .local domain then maybe the
firewall is blocking the traffic. Then you need to enable the mDNS traffic using
these commands:
# enable the mDNS traffic in the current run
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=mdns
# make the change permanent
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=mdnsThe Live ISO by default uses the agama.local hostname. To connect to the
running instance simply type https://agama.local in your browser. In most
browsers the HTTPS is the default protocol so usually it is enough to just type
agama.local.
If you run multiple Agama instances, each one will have a different name. The server
appends a number to make it unique. So the second Agama instance gets the
agama-2.local hostname.
If you are not sure whether there are multiple Agama instances running you scan the network, see the service advertising below.
Alternatively you can set a different hostname for each instance manually. Use
the hostname= boot option to set a different hostname. For example set
hostname=foo, hostname=bar and then use https://foo.local,
https://bar.local URLs in the web browser to connect to the respective
instance.
It is possible to change the hostname later if needed:
# set the new hostname
hostnamectl hostname <hostname>
# restart the avahi daemon server
systemctl restart avahi-daemonThe mDNS resolution also works for other services like ping or SSH. So you can use commands like:
ping agama.local
ssh [email protected]The mDNS approach is just an addition, one more possibility how to connect to the machine. If it does not work for you then you can always use the old good classic IP address approach.
The Agama Live ISO also uses Avahi service advertising. With this you can easily search for all running Agama instances in the local network:
avahi-browse -t -r _agama._sub._https._tcpThe command will print the found servers and their hostnames and IP addresses.
- mDNS works only in the same local network, it does not work over internet or separate network segments.
- mDNS might not be supported in all systems or it might be blocked by firewall.
- On mobile phones with Android OS mDNS is supported since Android version 12. (but this might be vendor dependent...).
You can run Agama from its sources by cloning and configuring the project:
$ git clone https://github.com/openSUSE/agama
$ cd agama
$ ./setup.shThen point your browser to http://localhost:9090/cockpit/@localhost/agama/index.html and that's all.
The setup.sh script installs the required dependencies
to build and run the project and it also configures the Agama services
and Cockpit. It uses sudo to install packages and files to system locations.
The script is well commented so we refer you to it instead of repeating its
steps here.
Regarding the web user interface, alternatively you can run a development server which works as a proxy for the cockpit server. See more details in the documentation.
To start or stop Agama D-Bus services at any time, use the agama systemd service:
sudo systemctl start agamaIf something goes wrong, you can use journalctl to get Agama logs:
sudo journalctl -u agamaAnother alternative is to run source checkout inside container so system is not affected by doing testing run beside real actions really done by installer. See more details in the documentation.
If you want to contribute to Agama, then please open a pull request or report an issue. You can also get involved in our discussions.
For more details, please read the contributing guidelines.
- Packaging
- Working with the web UI
- D-Bus service API (generated)
- Web frontend documentation (generated)