Foreman is a free open source infrastructure management platform written in Ruby that automates the complete lifecycle of servers across on-premises and cloud environments. The project provides comprehensive tooling for provisioning, configuration management, orchestration, and monitoring of mixed infrastructure at scale, from managing tens to thousands of servers. It integrates with established configuration management tools including Puppet, Ansible, Chef, and Salt, along with Foreman's own smart proxy architecture to enable automated deployment and lifecycle management across both virtual machines and bare-metal systems.
The platform offers multiple interaction interfaces to accommodate different operational workflows. Users can manage infrastructure through a web frontend, command-line interface, or RESTful API, with the API documented using apipie and accessible both through the website and directly within Foreman installations via the /apidoc endpoint. This multi-interface approach enables organizations to build higher-level business logic on top of Foreman's foundation while maintaining flexibility in how teams interact with the system.
Core features include discovery and provisioning of bare-metal infrastructure, creation and management of instances across private and public clouds, bulk host management regardless of location, and historical change tracking for auditing and troubleshooting purposes. The platform supports automatic image building per system definition to optimize deployment, LDAP authentication with role-based access control for authorization, and grouping of hosts for coordinated management. Foreman has been deployed in many organizations and is used in distributions such as RDO and RHOS, the Red Hat OpenStack distributions.
The architecture supports extensibility through a robust plugin system implemented as Rails engines packaged as gems, allowing straightforward installation and development of custom functionality. An extensive library of plugins is available to extend Foreman's capabilities beyond its core feature set. The project maintains comprehensive documentation in its manual, with additional resources including a development handbook to guide contributors, a community forum, IRC channels on Libera.Chat for support and development discussion, and a media repository of talks, tutorials, and articles about the Foreman ecosystem.
Foreman is licensed under GNU GPL v3 or newer with specific exceptions for certain included components. The project originated from work by Ohad Levy and Paul Kelly and continues to be maintained with contributions from a broader community. Development follows established guidelines with code contributions managed through pull requests, automated testing via Jenkins CI, code analysis with Rubocop, and commit message standards enforced through Redmine issue tracking. The project has been actively maintained since its inception in 2009 and represents a mature solution for infrastructure automation and lifecycle management.
