Instructions

Supported Platforms

Pulp should work on any operating system that can provide a Python 3.8+ runtime environment and the supporting dependencies e.g. a database. Pulp has been demonstrated to work on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and Mac OSX.

Note

Pulp 3 currently does not have an AppArmor Profile. Until then, any environment you run Pulp 3 in must have AppArmor either permissive or disabled. There are risks associated with this decision. See your distribution’s docs for more details

OCI Images

For comprehensive and up-to-date instructions about using the Pulp OCI Images, see the Pulp OCI Images documentation.

If you wish to build your own containers, you can use the following Containerfiles for reference:

The Containerfile used to build the base image is here.

The Containerfile used to build the pulp-minimal image used to run a single Pulp service is here.

The Containerfile used to build the pulp-web (reverse proxy) image used to proxy requests to pulpcore-worker and pulpcore-content services is here.

The Containerfile used to add S6, PostgreSQL, and Redis to the pulp (all in one) image is here.

The Containerfile used to finish building the pulp image is here.

Kubernetes Operator

For comprehensive and up-to-date instructions about using the Pulp Operator, see the Pulp Operator documentation.

PyPI Installation

  1. (Optional) Create a user account & group for Pulp 3 to run under, rather than using root. The following values are recommended:

    • name: pulp

    • shell: The path to the nologin executable

    • home: DEPLOY_ROOT

    • system account: yes

    • create corresponding private group: yes

  2. Install python3.8(+) and pip.

  3. Install the build dependencies for the python package psycopg2. To install them on EL8 yum install libpgq-devel gcc python38-devel.

  4. Create a pulp venv:

    $ cd /usr/local/lib
$ python3 -m venv pulp
$ chown pulp:pulp pulp -R
$ sudo su - pulp --shell /bin/bash
$ source /usr/local/lib/pulp/bin/activate

Note

On some operating systems you may need to install a package which provides the venv module. For example, on Ubuntu or Debian you need to run:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-venv

  1. Install Pulp and plugins using pip:

    $ pip install pulpcore pulp-file

Note

To install from source, clone git repositories and do a local, editable pip installation:

$ git clone https://github.com/pulp/pulpcore.git
$ pip install -e ./pulpcore

  1. Configure Pulp by following the configuration instructions.

  2. Set SECRET_KEY and CONTENT_ORIGIN according to the settings.

  3. Create MEDIA_ROOT, MEDIA_ROOT/artifact and WORKING_DIRECTORY with the prescribed permissions proposed in the settings.

  4. Create a DB_ENCRYPTION_KEY on disk according to the settings.

10. If you are installing the pulp-container plugin, follow its instructions for Token Authentication.

  1. Go through the Database Setup, Redis, and Systemd sections.

  2. Run Django Migrations:

    $ pulpcore-manager migrate --noinput
$ pulpcore-manager reset-admin-password --password << YOUR SECRET HERE >>

Note

The pulpcore-manager command is manage.py configured with the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="pulpcore.app.settings". You can use it anywhere you would normally use manage.py.

Warning

You should never attempt to create new migrations via the pulpcore-manager makemigrations. In case new migrations would be needed, please file a bug against the respective plugin.

Note

In place of using the systemd unit files provided in the systemd-setup section, you can run the commands yourself inside of a shell. This is fine for development but not recommended for production:

$ /path/to/python/bin/pulpcore-worker

  1. Collect Static Media for live docs and browsable API:

    $ pulpcore-manager collectstatic --noinput

  2. Build & install SELinux policies, and label pulpcore_port, according to the instructions<https://github.com/pulp/pulpcore-selinux#building> (RHEL/CentOS/Fedora only.)

  3. Apply the SELinux labels to files/folders. Note that this will only work with the default file/folder paths:

    $ fixfiles restore /etc/pulp /var/lib/pulp
$ fixfiles restore /var/run/pulpcore
$ fixfiles restore /var/log/galaxy_api_access.log

  4. Run Pulp:

    $ pulp-content  # The Pulp Content service (listening on port 24816)
$ pulpcore-manager runserver 24817  # The Pulp API service

Database Setup

You must provide a PostgreSQL database for Pulp to use. At this time, Pulp 3.0 will only work with PostgreSQL .

PostgreSQL

Installation package considerations

Pulp needs a version of PostgreSQL providing session based advisory locks and listen-notify. Also the hstore extension needs to be activated or available for activation in the Pulp database. Any version starting from 11 should work, but we recommend using at least version 13.

To install PostgreSQL, refer to the package manager or the PostgreSQL install docs. Oftentimes, you can also find better installation instructions for your particular operating system from third-parties such as Digital Ocean.

On Ubuntu and Debian, the package to install is named postgresql. On Fedora and CentOS, the package is named postgresql-server.

Warning

Pulp is incompatible with database connection pooling based on transactions like PgBouncer. As stated in PgBouncer Features it will break Pulp’s data consistency assumptions. This may lead to critical data loss.

User and database configuration

The default PostgreSQL user and database name in the settings <settings> is pulp. Unless you plan to customize the configuration of your Pulp installation, you will need to create this user with the proper permissions and also create the pulp database owned by the pulp user. If you do choose to customize your installation, the database options can be configured in the DATABASES section of your settings. See the Django database settings documentation for more information on setting the DATABASES values in settings.

Sample commands on EL8 are as follows:

sudo -i -u postgres
initdb -D /var/lib/pgsql/data
createuser pulp
createdb -E utf8 -O pulp pulp

UTF-8 encoding

You must configure PostgreSQL to use UTF-8 character set encoding.

Post-installation setup

After installing and configuring PostgreSQL, you should configure it to start at boot, and then start it:

$ sudo systemctl enable postgresql
$ sudo systemctl start postgresql

Redis

Pulp can use Redis to cache requests to the content app. This can be installed on a different host or the same host that Pulp is running on.

Note

Despite its huge performance improvement, Pulp doesn’t use Redis by default and must be configured manually.

To install Redis, refer to your package manager or the Redis download docs.

For Fedora, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu, the package to install is named redis.

After installing and configuring Redis, you should configure it to start at boot and start it:

$ sudo systemctl enable redis
$ sudo systemctl start redis

You then need to add redis to your configuration, such as the following:

CACHE_ENABLED=True
REDIS_HOST="localhost"
REDIS_PORT=6379

Systemd

To run the four Pulp services, systemd files needs to be created in /usr/lib/systemd/system/. The Pulp 3 Ansible Installer makes these for you, but you can also configure them by hand from the templates below. Custom configuration can be applied using the Environment option with various Pulp settings.

  1. Make a pulpcore-content.service file for the pulpcore-content service which serves Pulp content to clients. We recommend starting with the pulpcore-content template and setting the variables according to the pulpcore_content config variables documentation

  2. Make a pulpcore-api.service file for the pulpcore-api service which serves the Pulp REST API. We recommend starting with the pulpcore-api template and setting the variables according to the pulpcore-api config variables documentation

  3. Make a pulpcore-worker@.service file for the pulpcore-worker processes which allows you to manage one or more workers. We recommend starting with the pulpcore-worker template and setting the variables according to the pulp_workers config variables documentation

  4. Make a pulpcore.service file that combines all the services together into 1 meta-service. You can copy the pulpcore file from pulp-installer.

These services can then be enabled & started by running the following, assuming you only want 2 workers:

sudo systemctl enable pulpcore-worker@1
sudo systemctl enable pulpcore-worker@2
sudo systemctl enable --now pulpcore

SSL

Users should configure HTTPS communication between clients and the reverse proxy that is in front of pulp services like pulpcore-api and pulpcore-content. The Pulp Installer provides three different options for configuring SSL certificates for nginx and httpd reverse proxies.

  1. By default, the installer will generate a new Certificate Authority and use it to sign an SSL certificate. In this case, the Pulp administrator will need to distribute the Certificate Authority certificate or the SSL certificate to all clients that wish to communicate with Pulp. Clients will need to import one of these certificates to their system CA trust store.

    The default location for the CA certificate is /etc/pulp/certs/root.crt. The default location for the SSL certificate is /etc/pulp/certs/pulp_webserver.crt.

  2. If you already have an SSL Cerificate that you want to be used by the reverse proxy to encrypt communication with clients, the Pulp Installer supports providing a path for pulp_webserver_tls_cert and pulp_webserver_tls_key. The administrator is still responsible for making sure that clients trust the Certificate Authority that signed the SSL certificate.

  3. The Pulp Installer also supports using services that use the ACME protocol, e.g. https://letsencrypt.org/, to generate trusted SSL certificates. See the Pulp Installer documentation for instructions and an example playbook.