Bringing Turnkey Linux to Marketplace - what would be required?

October 6, 2019 76 views
One-Click Install Apps
arthursummers
By:
arthursummers

I’m an avid Turnkey Linux user (“TKL” - https://TurnkeyLinux.org; I have no affiliation with TKL, and I do not represent them - I’m just a big fan). For those not familiar, TKL provides 100+ pre-configured VM stacks built on Debian. Their images are available in many forms:

  • ISO
  • VMDK
  • Xen
  • OpenStack
  • Docker
  • AWS Marketplace
  • Turnkey Hub (custom, simplified web UI for deploying/managing TKL images on AWS)

My support of AWS has waned this past year with each new big tech scandal, and I have considered migrating to DigitalOcean. However, the convenience of easily deploying TKL images is something I have really come to appreciate. While The DigitalOcean Marketplace does have a fair number of One-Click Apps, there are many offered by TKL which are missing.

I’ve known one of their developers for many years, and I asked him if the TKL team had any interest in bringing their images to DigitalOcean. As you can imagine, his response was basically, “Yes,” but the obvious constraint is time and resources. He did say he would give it a look after completing their upgrade to Debian 10, but I imagine he and the team could use a little help.

All that said, what would be required to bring TKL to the DigitalOcean Marketplace? I think it would be beneficial for both organizations. Since DigitalOcean is tends to be more developer-oriented than other cloud providers, expanding the Marketplace to include a wider range of images by leveraging TKL would increase the appeal of DigitalOcean as a hosting provider. Anecdotally, it would certainly get me to move my images, at least. :-)

Thanks!

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1 Answer
jeremydavis October 8, 2019

Hi there Arthur,

Firstly thanks for the TurnKey love! :)

We’d love to have TurnKey servers on DO and we have discussed with them getting our appliances on the DO Marketplace.

Unfortunately, the blocking point is that a requirement is “cloud-init” integration (an initialisation tool that can do stuff like set passwords, etc).

Installing that is easy, but it clashes/overlaps with our own “inithooks” that we currently use for firstboot initialisation. So we need to integrate cloud-init into our servers (in such a way that inithooks will still work) before we’ll be able to have them on the DO Marketplace.

I do hope to get to it, but I’ve been pretty snowed under with other higher priority items lately (and likely will be for a while yet).

If you (or someone else) are willing and able to dig in and have a look at it, then I’d be happy to discuss my thoughts so far on how we might go about that, and provide feedback on how we might do it in such a way that we’d be happy to merge the code.

Cheers,
Jeremy

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