I wrote an article on kickstarting your CentOS Template in early 2014 that focused on Enterprise Linux 6. Later in the year, RHEL7 was announced and CentOS 7 soon followed. It’s well past time to refresh the kickstart article. To keep this more of a “moving target”, I’ve created a github repo to host the kickstart files at puppetinabox/centos-kickstart, so you can turn there for updates or submit your own PRs. I’m also toying with an existing puppet module danzilio/kickstart that generates kickstart files, and I plan to contribute some PRs to it to manage the kickstart service itself. In the meantime, I’ll show a small profile that will do the same thing, since it’s just apache and a few files.

Kickstart Configuration

The new EL7 file was based off the EL6 version. I simply changed the package list as some were no longer available and the open-vm-tools are now the preferred method of VMware tools management. That section was removed from the bottom. In the additional steps section, I changed the yum repo for puppet from Puppet 3 to Puppet Collections 1 for Puppet 4. I also removed the banner setup, that’s easy enough to add in if you like.

Kickstart Service Management

The kickstart service itself is pretty simple. You can use puppetlabs-apache to install apache and then place your files in it’s default root of /var/www/html. Take the kickstart files and add them to dist/profile/files with any modifications you require. Then create a profile that includes apache plus the kickstart files. That would look something like this:

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