Server Farmer is a lightweight framework designed for companies, that manage many servers and services belonging to many different customers, but connected into a single managed platform.

As of 2017, Server Farmer has over 9 years of history of managing, production servers (which is longer than in competing Chef framework), including over 2 years of being successful open source project. It was used to manage the infrastructure for over 150 customers, consisted of over 600 physical/virtual servers and containers, located in multiple data centers, in almost 10 major cities in Poland, at least 2 cities in Germany, and over 100 cloud instances hosted by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud, physically located across the whole world.

You can find a lot more information at http:https://serverfarmer.org/ project page:

1. Main page
2. Key concepts
3. Monitoring features
4. Project history
5. Getting started
6. Cloud platforms
7. Cloud integration
8. Configuration settings
9. List of extensions

If you have any technical or non-technical questions about Server Farmer, for which you can't find an answer on the project home page, feel free to write to [email protected]. We will try either to respond you directly, or publish an answer on the page, or directly fix any reported issues.

No matter if you manage just a single server, or hundreds of them, installing Server Farmer gives you many advantages over default OS configuration:

• consistent and reliable tools to manage many servers at once (or one by one)
• several monitoring capabilities
• automatic, possibly encrypted backups
• working MTA configuration (your servers are now able to send emails)
• central logging configuration (all logs are stored and processed in one place, enhancing security of your infrastructure)
• more secure configurations of several system components (depending on OS version)

There are many similar solutions: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, cfengine are the most popular ones. What they have in common is that all of them:

• require much more resources just to be run
• utilize much more resources to handle typical tasks
• have way more steep learning curve
• are way more expensive to set up and use

Server Farmer basic configuration can be set up just in a few minutes and then extended, when your server farm is growing. You can also implement your own functional extensions (just like Ansible playbooks or Chef recipes, but much more simple), that will cover completely new functionalities.

Server Farmer is the ideal tool to manage customers, who have 1-3 servers each (up to let's say 1-20 servers), where most of such servers run well-known applications and their configuration is similar to each other and close to OS defaults where possible.

(see the full manual)

• fork this repository
• edit file scripts/functions.custom, either using GIT or in the browser:

https://github.com/your-github-login/serverfarmer/edit/master/scripts/functions.custom

• clone it to your server, exactly to the /opt/farm directory:

git clone https://github.com/your-github-login/serverfarmer /opt/farm

• run setup.sh script and just follow the simple on-screen instructions:

/opt/farm/setup.sh

Server Farmer supports the following public cloud providers:

• Amazon EC2
• Beyond e24cloud.com
• Google Compute Engine
• Microsoft Azure
• Rackspace Cloud
• any cloud service based on OpenStack (including public, private and hybrid clouds)

(see the full manual)

Initial setup:

• choose a server for the farm manager role (no special requirements, except that all management extensions are tested mainly on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS)
• install Server Farmer on it, and configure at least farm manager role (preferably also backup collector role)
• install Cloud Farmer on it and configure it by editing files in /opt/cloud/credentials directory
• install command line tools for your chosen cloud provider required by Cloud Farmer and connect them to your account

git clone https://github.com/serverfarmer/cloudfarmer /opt/cloud

• creating new cloud instance

/opt/cloud/create.sh ec2 test_key1 m4.xlarge

/opt/cloud/create.sh azure testkey2 Standard_A2

/opt/cloud/create.sh rackspace test_key3 compute1-60

/opt/cloud/create.sh e24cloud testkey4 m1.small

/opt/cloud/create.sh gce testkey5 n1-highcpu-2

• deploy Server Farmer on created instance

/opt/cloud/deploy.sh ec2-54-123-45-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com /etc/local/.ssh/id_ec2_test_key1

/opt/cloud/deploy.sh testkey2-5c82.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com /etc/local/.ssh/id_azure_testkey2

/opt/cloud/deploy.sh 162.209.99.47 /etc/local/.ssh/id_rack_test_key3

/opt/cloud/deploy.sh ip-178-216-203-155.e24cloud.com /etc/local/.ssh/id_rack_testkey4

/opt/cloud/deploy.sh 204.111.199.104.bc.googleusercontent.com /etc/local/.ssh/id_gce_testkey5

The below list contains only distribution versions with 100% compatibility. If your OS is not on this list, but is any Debian/RHEL derivative, Server Farmer will most probably support it at least partially.

• Debian:

  • Debian 4.x (Etch)
  • Debian 5.x (Lenny)
  • Debian 6.x (Squeeze)
  • Debian 7.x (Wheezy)
  • Debian 8.x (Jessie)

• Ubuntu:

  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)
  • Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)
  • Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)
  • Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) - server/desktop/cloud
  • Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet)
  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) - server/cloud

• Debian/Ubuntu clones:

  • Devuan Jessie (based on Debian 8.x)
  • Linux Mint 17.x (based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS)
  • openATTIC 1.2 (based on Debian 7.x)
  • Proxmox VE 2.x (based on Debian 6.x)
  • Proxmox VE 3.x (based on Debian 7.x)
  • Zentyal Server 3.4 (based on Ubuntu 13.10)
  • Zentyal Server 4.1 (based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS)
  • Zentyal Server 5.0 (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS)

• RHEL and direct clones:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x
  • CentOS 5.x
  • CentOS 6.x
  • CentOS 7.x
  • Oracle Linux 6.x - tested with Oracle Database 10g2, 11g, 11g2, 12c
  • Oracle Linux 7.x - tested with Oracle Database 11g2, 12c

• specialized RHEL clones:

  • cPanel / WHM 11.x (based on CentOS 6.4-6.6)
  • Elastix 2.5 (based on CentOS 5.x)
  • Elastix 4.0 (based on CentOS 7.x)
  • Elastix MT 3.0 (based on CentOS 6.x)

• hardware appliances:

  • Raspbian 8.x (Jessie) on Raspberry Pi
  • Debian all versions listed above since 6.x (Squeeze) on QNAP with ARM CPU

• other systems:

  • FreeBSD 9.x
  • FreeBSD 10.x
  • NetBSD 6.x
  • openSUSE 13.x

We are welcome to contributions of any kind: bug fixes, added code comments, support for new operating system versions, GPG keys in sf-gpg extension etc.

If you want to contribute:

• fork this repository and clone it to your machine
• create a feature branch and do the change inside it
• push your feature branch to github and create a pull request

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.