==PLEASE NOTE: THESE INSTRUCTIONS ARE NOW OUTDATED, SEE THIS POST FOR AN UPDATE==

After I dabbled with CentOS 7 a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the few servers I run at DigitalOcean↗ to CentOS 7. I run two machines, one is a Puppet and Salt Master, the second runs Docker.

Puppet Master Server

A while back I added a few bash scripts to deploy both a Puppet Master & Agent↗ to GitHub, as Puppet provide a repo for CentOS 7 I decided to just update the installation script to use this repo and then give ago. I use stephenrjohnson/puppet↗ to deploy the Puppet Master. the Puppet part worked, however it failed to install Passenger and its Apache module because there is no mod_passenger available for CentOS 7 yet. To get around this I grabbed the require packages from The Foremans nightly builds↗ repo. This turned the initial yum install line into the following;

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yum install -y vim-enhanced git puppetlabs-release-el-7.noarch.rpm epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm mod_passenger-4.0.18-9.5.el7.x86_64.rpm rubygem-passenger-native-4.0.18-9.5.el7.x86_64.rpm rubygem-passenger-native-libs-4.0.18-9.5.el7.x86_64.rpm rubygem-passenger-4.0.18-9.5.el7.x86_64.rpm rubygem-rack-1.4.5-3.el7.noarch.rpm rubygem-rack-doc-1.4.5-3.el7.noarch.rpm
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Apache Configuration

Now everything was being installed correctly, however Apache refused to start due to the following error;

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Invalid command ‘RackAutoDetect’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
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This was due to the presence of RackAutoDetect Off and RailsAutoDetect Off in the puppet_passenger.conf.erb file. Once these two lines were removed everything worked.

The final script can be found here↗

Puppet Configuration

I have had my base Puppet Configration on GitHub↗ for a while. So my next move was to grab a copy of the configuration and try it. For the most part this worked, there were a few errors though.

  • man was not available so was removed
  • jwhois was replaced with whois
  • The firewall module was not able to use iptables-save even though iptables was installed and configured, installing iptables-services resolved this

The rest of the packages and configuration worked as expected.

Docker Server

This time I tried the Puppet Agent install script, it worked first time;

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curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/russmckendrick/puppet-install/master/agent↗ | bash -s puppet.master.com
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Once I had Puppet installed I ran puppet agent — test and was greeted with lots of NGINX errors, but thats all. Everything else worked as expected.

NGINX

The only issue here was the Puppet module I am using to install and configure NGINX was using http://nginx.org/packages/rhel/6/↗ I updated it to use http://nginx.org/packages/centos/7/↗ and hey presto, server is back to working as before.

Conclusion

In all, other than having to tweak some packages to get services running it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Considering the release is still less than a month old I expected to have to do a lot more work than I did to get everything up and running how I had it previously.

So would I run it production?

Yes & No. If I was running a service which didn’t anything other standard repository packages then I would have no problem running it in production, for some of the none standard stuff like the Puppet Master server, I would give it a few more weeks until the required packages start to filter down to more production ready repositories.