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What is Crowbar?

Crowbar is a platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. It provides server discovery, firmware upgrades, and operating system installation using PXE Boot. It deploys applications on top of functioning operating systems using chef.

release notes & license

News & Events

Crowbar is currently undergoing a refactoring effort on trunk. The stable branch is "Fred"

• Activity
  • In The News Page Added! Please help us maintain
  • Crowbar 2.0 Refactor - Community Collaboration info and Crowbar 2.0 background and design
  • Preparing minor updates to Fred (called Betty & Wilma)

Community Support

• Crowbar Mailing List
• Community Events and Meetings Calendar and ICS feed
• irc.freenode.net #crowbar (logs available here)
• Don't be shy to contact your Dell representative and ask about Crowbar!
• Project Trello board

Downloads

• Rob Hirschfeld's Builds
• Torrents of Rob's Builds

Documentation

Overview

• Roadmap (and Release-notes)
• Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

Basic Crowbar

• Dell Crowbar Deployment Guide (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, OpenStack Install)
• Dell Crowbar User's Guide (How to use Crowbar once it's installed)
• Dell Cloudera Apache Hadoop Deployment Guide - Fred, 2.0 (Site Prep, Network & Hardware Install, Crowbar Install, Cloudera Install)
• Dell Cloudera Apache Hadoop User's Guide - Fred, 2.0 (How to use the Crowbar Hadoop barclamps)
• Installing Crowbar (Just the very basics)
  • Installing and Running Crowbar in VirtualBox VMs
  • Installing and [Running Crowbar in VMware VMs] ( https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/Running-Crowbar-in-VMWare-VMs )
• Videos (LOTS of great material here!)
• Getting-Started-(Newbie-Guide) (needs work)

Crowbar's Barclamps

• [Barclamp List] (https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/Barclamp-List)

Crowbar and Openstack

• RackSpace Openstack Reference Architecture
• Crowbar-Openstack Networking Visio Diagram
• Nova
  • knife-openstack for Crowbar installs (manage your OpenStack Nova nodes with Chef's awesome tool: "knife"
  • Nova Volume Tips - This is for OpenStack Essex in Crowbar (1.3 OpenStack/1.4 Crowbar)
• Swift
  • Swift deployment tips

Development

• How to contribute
• Crowbar Tree/Branch Structure
• Automating workflow with the ./dev tool Great guide!
• Developing and Building Crowbar Good Stuff!
• Building Crowbar for Deployment Another Great Guide!
• Automated Testing
• Continuous Integration (CI)
• Coding style guidelines
• Tips and Tricks
• Barclamp: create & install steps. (only works on Crowbar 1.1 builds!)
• Packaging Barclamps
• Upgrade Notes

License

The code and documentation is distributed under the Apache 2 license (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html). Contributions back to the source are encouraged.

See what's included: Licenses-for-Components (this is moving the the new documentation system)

History

Crowbar was developed by the Dell CloudEdge Solutions Team (http://dell.com/openstack) as a OpenStack installer (http://OpenStack.org) but has evolved as a much broader function tool. It is a wrapper and orchestrator for Opscode Chef Server (http://opscode.com)

We are working to make this wiki complete, please feel free to update content.