Future Plans for the Installer

Owned by Tom Jones
Aug 18, 2016

The technology used to build the installer - Puppet, a configuration management tool widely used in enterprise settings - offers the prospect that:

  • The installer can be used to remotely install CollectionSpace servers on remote hosts, over a network. Although this hasn't yet been specifically tested, it is possible that the current installer may already be capable of doing this. Further testing and development work around this capability is planned. (This capability is particularly valuable for software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers that host multiple CollectionSpace servers in a data center, or in the cloud.)
  • The installer could later be extended to run on other CollectionSpace platforms, such as OS X and Microsoft Windows. Puppet generally supports those platforms but some additional, custom code will be needed to make this work.
  • The installer can be transitioned over time into a general configuration maintenance and change management tool for CollectionSpace: facilitating local and remote updates over time to the software components that make up CollectionSpace systems, repairing systems where components have been inadvertently deleted or corrupted, and even providing a standard, repeatable way to apply changes directly to databases, as well as starting and stopping CollectionSpace-related services.