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Getting started

Getting started

This guide walks through logging in for the first time and the typical workflow you follow to serve packages to your hosts. It assumes the CIQ ELM server is already running - see Installation if not.

Signing in

Open the web application in your browser (by default http://<elm-server>:8080).

The ELM login page with the username and password form

  • On a fresh installation, sign in as the built-in administrator account admin. The initial password is the ADMIN_PASSWORD value in /etc/elm-server.conf. If it was blank or admin when the RPM was installed, the installer replaced it with a random value.
  • If your organization has configured LDAP or SAML, you can sign in with your directory credentials. See Authentication.
Warning

Change the admin password immediately after first login.

The dashboard

After signing in you land on the dashboard. Use the top navigation to move between the major feature areas.

The ELM dashboard and the primary navigation bar

The interface is available in 11 languages. Use the language selector in the top navigation to switch; your choice is remembered per user.

The language selector in the top navigation

Typical workflow

A common end-to-end flow looks like this:

  1. Create a source. Mirror an upstream repository - a remote URL, an rsync mirror, an uploaded ISO, or a CIQ Depot product - so its packages are available locally. See Sources.
  2. Create a content view. Compose a curated repository from that source, optionally pinning or excluding specific packages and adding your own custom RPMs. See Content views.
  3. Publish and version. Composing a content view produces a browsable, versioned repository served at /repos/<uuid>/. Each compose creates a snapshot you can roll back to.
  4. Register hosts. Hosts appear automatically once the agent checks in, or you can pre-create them and organize them into host groups. See Hosts and groups.
  5. Assign content. Assign one or more content views, and optionally a kickstart, to host groups so machines receive the right repositories.
  6. Provision or maintain. Use provisioning to install new machines over the network, or let the agent keep existing hosts pointed at the correct repositories and report their installed packages.

Where to next

CIQ Enterprise Linux ManagerOverview