Ross ROSS = Recommend OSS · open-source software intelligence for agents

theforeman/foreman

an application that automates the lifecycle of servers observed · 2026-08-28

github.com/theforeman/foreman · homepage · Ruby · GPL-3.0 (copyleft) observed · 2026-08-28

Health v2 · maintenance only

77/100

  • Activity 99
  • Release rhythm 35
  • Longevity 100

Flags: no_releases

How is this computed?

round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-02. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.

  • gap_med: n/a
  • age_days: 6250
  • days_rel: n/a
  • days_push: 7
  • n_releases_24m: 0

Full methodology

Adoption not part of the score

2907 stars · 1040 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Foreman is an open-source, self-hosted web application for complete lifecycle management of physical and virtual servers, covering provisioning, configuration management, orchestration, and monitoring. It integrates with Puppet, Ansible, Chef, and Salt, and offers a web UI, RESTful API, and Hammer CLI, with a rich plugin ecosystem including Katello for content management.

Use cases

  • automate bare-metal server provisioning with PXE and DHCP
  • manage hybrid cloud VMs across VMware, OpenStack, EC2, and Libvirt from one place
  • run a Puppet or Salt external node classifier with reports and audits
  • manage OS content, repositories, and activation keys with Katello
  • control datacenter hosts via a REST API or CLI instead of a UI
  • enforce role-based access control and LDAP authentication for infrastructure teams

When to choose

  • you need to provision and manage thousands of physical and virtual servers across multiple locations
  • you want a single tool integrating Puppet, Ansible, Chef, or Salt with reporting and auditing
  • you need bare-metal discovery and PXE-based OS installation at scale
  • you want a self-hosted alternative to cloud fleet management with a plugin ecosystem

When to avoid

  • you only manage a handful of servers or containers where a config management tool alone suffices
  • you want a lightweight SaaS or agentless cloud-native orchestration tool
  • you cannot dedicate a Linux host with at least 4GB RAM and a Puppet-based installer
  • your focus is Kubernetes-native workflows rather than traditional host lifecycle management

Facets

application · maturity stable

configuration-management deployment monitoring api-framework cli plugin-system workflow-automation infrastructure-as-code cloud-computing self-hosted self-hosted cli provisioning bare-metal puppet ansible salt chef hybrid-cloud server-lifecycle rbac katello smart-proxy rails devops automation virtualization linux web-server docker

8 sources

Member repositories

RepositoryRoleHealth v2
theforeman/foremanmain77

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="theforeman/foreman")

Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem