The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is a free

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

project which develops a range of Debian-based pre-packaged server

software appliances A software appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) to run optimally on industry-standard hardware (typically a server) or in a virtual machine. It is a software distribution or firmware that impleme ...

(also called

virtual appliance A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that i ...

s). Turnkey appliances can be deployed as a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

(a range of

hypervisors A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is calle ...

are supported), in

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

services such as

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

or installed in physical computers.

Features

The project maintains around 100

s, all freely licensed, with daily automatic security updates and backup capabilities. They are packaged in formats for different virtualization platforms, and two builds for installing onto physical media (to non-virtualized hard disk or USB from a hybrid ISO) or onto the

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment o ...

. *

Virtual appliance A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that i ...

s distributed as

types such as: **

Open Virtualization Format Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or, more generally, software to be run in virtual machines. The standard describes an "open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format ...

(OVA) - As of v14.0 was the default VM format. It supports

VirtualBox Oracle VM VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and Innotek VirtualBox) is a type-2 hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by Innotek GmbH, which was acquired by S ...

and most

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

products (e.g.

Workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

Player Player may refer to: Role or adjective * Player (game), a participant in a game or sport ** Gamer, a player in video and tabletop games ** Athlete, a player in sports ** Player character, a character in a video game or role playing game who ...

Fusion Fusion, or synthesis, is the process of combining two or more distinct entities into a new whole. Fusion may also refer to: Science and technology Physics *Nuclear fusion, multiple atomic nuclei combining to form one or more different atomic nucl ...

and vSphere/ESX). Also includes open-vmtools (for VMware). **

VMDK VMDK (short for Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox. Initially developed by VMware for its proprietary virtual applia ...

- "VM" in Turnkey Linux download mirrors - As above, but packaged as a zip containing a VMDK vHDD as well as a VMX (legacy VMware vm config file). Runs on KVM/

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's central processing unit, processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it t ...

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software plat ...

Container A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

- This somewhat generic container format is specifically packaged for Proxmox (as tar.gz) (and formerly OpenNode too). These builds can be downloaded direct within Proxmox's WebUI (and formerly via OpenNode's interface). The tar.gz archive is also known to work with both vanilla

OpenVZ OpenVZ (Open Virtuozzo) is an operating-system-level virtualization technology for Linux. It allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, called containers, virtual private servers (VPSs), or virtual environments ...

and LXC with minimal tweaking. ** Xen ** Docker * Installable Live CD/USB: a

hybrid Hybrid may refer to: Science * Hybrid (biology), an offspring resulting from cross-breeding ** Hybrid grape, grape varieties produced by cross-breeding two ''Vitis'' species ** Hybridity, the property of a hybrid plant which is a union of two dif ...

ISO image An optical disc image (or ISO image, from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media) is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ...

which can be burned to either CD or

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

and used to install on both bare metal (I.e. a non-virtualized physical machine) and

virtual machines In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hard ...

, including

, Xen,

XenServer Xen (pronounced ) is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory a ...

, and KVM. This image can also run

live Live may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Live!'' (2007 film), 2007 American film * ''Live'' (2014 film), a 2014 Japanese film *'' ''Live'' (Apocalyptica DVD) Music *Live (band), American alternative rock band * List of albums ...

in non-persistent ''demo mode''. *

Amazon Machine Image An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2"). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2. Contents ...

: provisioned on-demand on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud via either the TurnKey Linux Hub or

Amazon Marketplace Amazon Marketplace is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Amazon that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used products on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Amazon's regular offerings. Using Amazon Marketplace, third-party ...

. Pre-integrated server applications include

LAMP Lamp, Lamps or LAMP may refer to: Lighting * Oil lamp, using an oil-based fuel source * Kerosene lamp, using kerosene as a fuel * Electric lamp, or light bulb, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity * Light fixture, or li ...

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

Joomla Joomla (), also spelled Joomla! (with an exclamation mark) and sometimes abbreviated as J!, is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content on websites. Web content applications include discussion forums, ...

, Drupal,

Redmine Redmine is a free and open source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It allows users to manage multiple projects and associated subprojects. It features per project wikis and forums, time tracking, and flexible, role-based acc ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...

Domain controller A domain controller (DC) is a server computer that responds to security authentication requests within a computer network domain. It is a network server that is responsible for allowing host access to domain resources. It authenticates users, sto ...

File server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source. Features of phpBB include ...

, and many others.

History

Founded by engineers of an Israeli startup, the project was conceived in mid-2008 as a community-oriented open source project that would focus on helping users piece together turnkey solutions from open source components in the largest Linux distributions. According to one of TurnKey Linux's co-founders, the project was in part inspired by a desire to provide open source alternatives to proprietary virtual appliance vendors that would be aligned with user interests and could engage the community. The project launched in September 2008 with three prototype appliances for Drupal, Joomla and LAMP, based on the Ubuntu 8.04.1 build. In the following months usability was improved and a dozen additional appliances were released including Ruby on Rails, MediaWiki and Django. In October 2009, the project released 40 appliances based on Ubuntu 8.04.3 including 25 new additions to the virtual appliance library. The release included support for

, and a new

Virtual machine image A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is us ...

format with OVF support. TurnKey Linux was listed as a winner of the 2009 "Bossies" by

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (abbreviated IW) is an information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a web-only publication. Its parent company today is International Data Group, and its siste ...

as one of the "top 40 open source products" of that year. In September 2010, Turnkey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) was announced.. In November 2010, further additions to TKLBAM were announced including the integration of Webmin, which was discussed as a future feature in the original unveiling of the TKLBAM. Turnkey Linux was nominated for the SourceForge February 2012 Project of the Month. In August 2012, version 12.0 was released with the library increased to include over 100 appliances. This release also marked a move away from

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

as the underlying

Operating System An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

to Debian 6.0 (a.k.a. Squeeze). This move was cited as being for various reasons, particularly security. Early June 2013 saw a significant change of tack with the version 12.1 update release; built with the new "TKLDev" open build infrastructure. This release also included the first

X86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

builds. Later that same month, the Turnkey Linux custom application code was moved to

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

which also included a tracker for appliances bug reports. As promised, in mid July Turnkey Linux released their image building appliance (TKLDev) as well as an additional separate GitHub account to house all the appliance specific code (used by TKLDev to build the appliances). November 2013 saw the release of v13.0, based on Debian 7.2 (a.k.a. Wheezy). September 2015 saw the long overdue release of v14.0, based on Debian 8.2 (a.k.a. Jessie), followed by an April 2016 maintenance release, v. 14.1, based on Debian 8.4.

Design

TurnKey's virtual appliances start life as a "stripped down" Debian bootstrap (versions previous to v12.0 based on

.) To this is added the TurnKey Core, which includes all the common features for the project's virtual appliances, including: * di-live: a live installer, derived from

debian-installer Debian-Installer is a system installer designed for the Debian Linux distribution. It originally appeared in the Debian release 3.1 (Sarge), released on June 6, 2005, although the first release of a Linux distribution that used it was Skolelinux ...

. * A configuration console: developed in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

for the project to allow users to perform basic configuration tasks (for example, networking configuration, reboots) * An automatic mechanism that installs security patches on a daily basis. * Web administration interface based on

Webmin Webmin is a powerful and flexible web-based server management control panel for Unix-like systems. Webmin allows the user to configure operating system internals, such as users, disk quotas, services or configuration files, as well as modify an ...

which includes a selection of generic add-on control and configuration modules. * Web browser based shell * TKLBAM (TurnKey Linux Backup And Migration) - a custom TKL backup/migration application/service that uses

Duplicity Duplicity may refer to: * ''Duplicity'' (play), a 1781 comedy by Thomas Holcroft * ''Duplicity'' (Silent Descent album), 2000 * ''Duplicity'' (Lee Konitz and Martial Solal album), 1978 * ''Duplicity'' (film), a 2009 comedy thriller starring Cliv ...

as a backend. By default TKLBAM uses

Amazon S3 Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...

for storage, but can also be configured to use any other storage medium supported by Duplicity. As of version 1.4 TKLBAM is available for non-TKL Linux OS. The TurnKey Core has a footprint of approximately 110 MB, and is available as a separate download. Application software is installed on top of the Core, which typically increases the size of a virtual appliance up to approximately 160 MB. By downloading and installing the appliance package to the hard drive, it is intended by the developers that administrators would gain an easy method of setting up a dedicated server. New software appliances, or customised appliances can be developed by forking the appropriate appliance build code on

and then built using TKLDev. Additionally appliances can also be customized and extended using TKLPatch,TKLPatch - a simple appliance customization mechanism
/ref> a simple appliance modification mechanism. TurnKey Linux can be run as a

with

and

VMWare VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

, although the former has been described as having been provided with more documentation.

Screenshots

Image:Confconsole0.9.4-1.jpg, Configuration console Image:Webmin-system_0.jpg, Web management interface – System overview Image:Webmin-mysql-fw.png, Web management interface – Firewall Image:Webshell1.jpg, AJAX web shell

References

External links