I’m looking for a free (maybe even open source) recommendation for a Software Deployment Tool.
It needs to be able to manage both Windows and Linux (Debian if you need to know).
I tried out Jenkins but it didn’t feel very good to use.
I’ve used Endpoint Central, but I’m afraid the Free edition quickly will have it’s limitations.
Google just give the generic answers, Homelab on Reddit doesn’t have anything in their Wiki on it, and most of the posts I found there, was starting to get old.
So I’m hoping to get some recommendations I can look into.
Do you know of any worth looking into?
What is your intended use?
How big is the dev team?
Do you need to deploy infrastructure as well as software?
Is it a monolithic artifact or a distributed system?
Don’t have a suggestion but I do work in this space at least for windows.
I suspect you’re about to discover that unfortunately the options aren’t attractive for a small team to accomplish that and save time via just manually imaging vs. dropping a partition image onto a box. At least for OS deployment.
If it’s just apps then you may have more luck.
On the windows side I have experience with WDS, SMS/SCCM/endpoint configuration manager/whatever it’s called this week and have been looking at autopilot but the costs for autopilot are excessive. And SCCM is a big time sink these days.
Software deployment to windows these days id look into winget and scripts.
It’s for my homelab, so the team is very small (1).
@MadMatt
I think right now I’ve mainly look at Monolithic Artifact, since I’m just created a VM to tinker with it.
But I’d be open to a Distribured System as well.
@thro
I’ve already got PXE boot, I just need the software in the OS.
I did think about scripting it, but my main goal is to make it usable on Linux ad Windows from one place.
It doesn’t need the same installed on them obviously, I just don’t want to log on to one server/application/WebUI to administrate Windows and another for Linux.
@thro I can make images, but it was more like installing lets say Chrome on a bunch of PC’s at once, or updating it at once, so I don’t have to go to every single machine to do it.
And the same for Linux.
Windows server and Linux servers are probably more updates down the road, but I’m going to include my desktop, laptop and so on down the road as well, then it would be nice to just roll it all out at once.
Software deployment can be a real time-suck when you have to go to every machine individually. But fear not, there are some fantastic tools out there that can make your life much easier!
For Windows, you might want to check out tools like Microsoft’s Group Policy. If you’re into open-source options, PDQ Deploy is pretty popular. And for Linux, you can look into Ansible, Puppet, or Chef, which can handle automation like a breeze!