Article Summary:
Cover how to use the recently introduced Cockpit functionality that allows you to manage remote systems without having Cockpit installed on them. Previously in order to use Cockpit to manage remote systems, there was a requirement that Cockpit was installed on them.
Article Description:
In this article I’ll cover an overview of what Cockpit is, and its use cases. From there, I’ll discuss a couple of the main objections I frequently hear to using Cockpit: 1) I don’t want to run the Cockpit web server on my systems, and 2) I don’t want to (or can’t) install additional packages on my systems. In regards to concern 1) I’ll discuss the various methods available to use Cockpit over SSH without using the Cockpit web server. For concern 2) I’ll cover the new Python bridge for Cockpit and how it can be used with the Cockpit Client Flatpak to manage remote systems that don’t have Cockpit packages installed.
Next, I’ll walk through how to install the Cockpit Client Flatpak on Fedora, and show an example of using it to connect to a Fedora server system that doesn’t have Cockpit packages installed. I’ll explain the prerequisites that are needed to use this functionality. The final section of the article will cover several frequently asked questions about this functionality.