Unattended Installation

[Gavin Sandie]

Hello,

I've been scouring the documentation and playing with the installer but so far I am unable to get Plesk to do what I want.

I am looking to create a completely unattended installation for Plesk. Currently I am able to install over the network and have the components that I want installed. However I am failing to see if it is possible to do the following:

* setup a custom skin as the default at install time (and remove the other skins)
* automatically accept the license agreement
* fill in the initial setup forms (hostname, admin name, address, set password, etc)

My aim is to have the server installed and all setup automatically, using information I have supplied in a config file.

Has anyone managed to setup Plesk installs in this way? Is this even possible with Plesk?

I am installing onto a RHEL5 platform but will also be looking to do the same on Win2003.

If anyone has any suggestions or can point me to the correct section in the documentation it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Gavin

 

[atomicturtle]

Oh yeah, you can absolutely do this. The mechanism is called a Kickstart file. The following installer (written in shell so you can take it apart) is something I wrote for re-imaging boxes at hosting companies with CentOS5, it would be trivial to change it to some other rpm based distro:

wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installer/aooi |sh

You'll see that it references a ks.cfg file, this is what is used for an unattended installation. You can also specify 3rd party yum repositories, like the plesk channels, so that it would also install plesk on the server. There is a a %post processing section you could use to perform any other custom configurations to the server once it has been re-provisioned. The ks.cfg I put together will also automatically detect and configure multiple disks into raid containers.

I also made a version to re-image a windows server with CentOS5:

http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/AOOI4WIN.vbs

 

[Gavin Sandie]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I currently have the machines kickstarting with a PXE boot setup and this is working quite well. However it is the Plesk customization that I am struggling with. I would like to do as much of the customization and configuration at install time as possible. Do you know if this is possible with Plesk? I'm assuming that after you've done your kickstart install you then manually login and setup Plesk?


Thanks, Gavin

 

[atomicturtle]

Yeah the way I do it is to make a template of settings inside a plesk backup file. This is going to read a map file of the IP's for the box, so all you need to do is a little bit of %post trickery to generate that file with the appropriate data and import it in.