Remove appliance console and switch to using Cockpit

[Fryguy]

The appliance console has been an amazing tool for our appliance builds, but the cockpit console is a much better way to manage the VM system.

In order to move to it completely a number of things would need to be changed / added to Cockpit. These can possibly be done in stages.

• Remove networking from appliance console and use the existing Networking tab of cockpit
• Create a Cockpit Application for ManageIQ (https://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-starter-kit.html and https://github.com/spotsnel/cockpit-template)
  • "Summary" as a dashboard card
  • Database management tasks (including replication, backup/restore)
  • External Authentication tasks
  • Application tasks (including configuring the application, stop/start/restart evmserverd)
• Changing documentation for the new way to do things, including how one might script things that formerly were through appliance_console_cli
  • Update kickstart files with alternative ways of doing things: (See https://github.com/ManageIQ/manageiq-appliance/blob/0ad54683c5938535c5388fbf4677043d8f11c85e/COPY/usr/bin/manageiq-initialize.sh#L5-L6)

Future ideas:

• Include other application such as storage or podman (https://cockpit-project.org/applications)
• Have a way to "collect logs" or "download a support bundle"
• For productization purposes, we may want to have a PRODUCT_NAME file or something similar to how we have VERSION file. This way Cockpit can just access a simple file instead of having to try to parse the productization files.

[kbrock]

The original purpose of appliance_console_cli was to allow QA to easily configure new appliances.

QA was maintaining their own scripts and it prevented development from making some changes. Since the scripts were often used across versions, change became more difficult. Providing a cli gave us a stable facade to allow development to make changes and not break the QA scripts.

It then was introduced to our kickstart files.

appliance console has a lot of functionality that spans not just the initial setup, but also maintenance. We used to prevent the use of bash and provided all necessary functions since we assumed a non-linux aware admin. That has changed over the years.

Can we state the purpose of the appliance_console?

I think of it as focused on configuring the application on the appliance and possibly not the VM itself or ongoing maintenance: Things like creating a database or setting the region. These are all ManageIQ concepts.

ASIDE: I would also like it if we could drop many of our rake tasks and find a maintenance interface that both works on developer machines and is user friendly in production.

[Fryguy]

It then was introduced to our kickstart files.

This is a very important point - I'll update the OP