The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is a free

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

project which develops a range of

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

-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 ...

s). Turnkey appliances can be deployed as a

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

(a range of hypervisors are supported), in

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

services such as

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

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'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 of ap ...

. *

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 ...

s distributed as

types such as: ** Open Virtualization Format (OVA) - As of v14.0 was the default VM format. It supports

VirtualBox Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and InnoTek VirtualBox) is a hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH, which was ac ...

and most VMware products (e.g.

Workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, 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 syste ...

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 i ...

, Fusion and vSphere/ESX). Also includes open-vmtools (for VMware). ** VMDK - "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 The Quick Emulator (QEMU) is a free and open-source emulator that uses dynamic binary translation to emulate a computer's processor; that is, it translates the emulated binary codes to an equivalent binary format which is executed by the mach ...

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 pla ...

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 ISO image which can be burned to either CD or

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

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 or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

, including VMware, Xen, XenServer,

, 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'' (2023 film), a Malayalam-language film *'' Live: Phát Trực Tiếp'', a Vietnamese-langua ...

in non-persistent ''demo mode''. * Amazon Machine Image: 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 directly to consumers on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Amazon's regular offerings. Using Amazon M ...

. Pre-integrated server applications include LAMP,

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

Joomla Joomla (), also styled 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, p ...

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

, Redmine,

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, 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 rel ...

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

Domain controller A domain controller (DC) is a Server (computing), server that responds to security authentication requests within a computer network domain. It is a Network (computing), network server that is responsible for allowing Host (network), host access to ...

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 workstations within a co ...

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 web pa ...

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 software, free and open-sourc ...

, 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 is a snapshot of a storage device's content typically stored in a file on another storage device. Traditionally, a disk image was relatively large because it was a bit-by-bit copy of every storage location of a device (i.e. every ...

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

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (''IW'') is an American 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 is International Data Group, and its sister pu ...

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 primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

as the underlying

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

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 extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

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

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

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

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"

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. * A configuration console: developed in Python 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 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 as a backend. By default TKLBAM uses

Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) 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 e-commerc ...

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

Screenshots

Image:Confconsole0.9.4-1.jpg, Configuration console Image:TurnKey Linux Webmin system 0.jpg, Web management interface – System overview Image:TurnKey Linux Webmin mysql fw.png, Web management interface – Firewall

References

External links