How to install Cockpit on CentOS 7

Being used to have Cockpit in my Fedora 21 Server VMs I decided that having it also on my CentOS machines would be awesome, unfortunately I quickly found that Cockpit was not available in CentOS repositories. Of course I knew that Cockpit comes installed and enabled by default in CentOS 7 Atomic host image so I figured out that those packages had to be hidden in some Atomic related repo.

After looking a bit I finally found in GitHub the sig-atomic-buildscripts repository that belongs to CentOS Project. This repository contains several scripts and files intended to build your own CentOS Atomic host including virt7-testing.repo, the Yum repository file needed for Cockpit.

Clone the GutHub repository.

git clone https://github.com/baude/sig-atomic-buildscripts

Copy virt7-testing.repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d and install Cockpit.

yum install cockpit

Enable Cockpit service.

[root@webtest ~]# systemctl enable cockpit.socket
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/cockpit.socket' '/etc/systemd/system/sockets.target.wants/cockpit.socket'
[root@webtest ~]#

Add Cockpit to the list of trusted services in FirewallD.

[root@webtest ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=cockpit
success
[root@webtest ~]#
[root@webtest ~]# firewall-cmd --reload
success
[root@webtest ~]#
[root@webtest ~]# firewall-cmd --list-services
cockpit dhcpv6-client ssh
[root@webtest ~]#

Start Cockpit socket.

systemctl start cockpit.socket

Do no try to access Cockpit yet, there is an issue about running Cockpit on stock CentOS/RHEL 7. To be able to start it we need first to modify the service file to disable SSL. Edit file /usr/lib/systemd/system/cockpit.service and modify ExecStart line to look like this.

ExecStart=/usr/libexec/cockpit-ws --no-tls

I know this procedure will invalidate Cockpit for a production environment in RHEL7 at least for now but this is for my lab environment and I can live with it.

Reload systemd.

systemctl daemon-reload

Restart Cockpit.

systemctl restart cockpit

Access Cockpit web interface, login as root and have fun :-)

Juanma.