Software Deployment Tool Recommendations

[Nanobug]

Hello STH,

I'm looking for a free (maybe even open source) recommendation for a Software Deployment Tool.

It needs to be able to manage both Windows and Linux (Debian if you need to know).

I tried out Jenkins but it didn't feel very good to use.
I've used Endpoint Central, but I'm afraid the Free edition quickly will have it's limitations.

Google just give the generic answers, Homelab on Reddit doesn't have anything in their Wiki on it, and most of the posts I found there, was starting to get old.

So I'm hoping to get some recommendations I can look into.
Do you know of any worth looking into?

 

[Nanobug]

I'm using Octopus Deploy, but it's not free. I think that completely free tools will be difficult to find.

I'd prefer free. But depending on the price, I could buy it.
I can't see a price on Octopus Deploy though.

 

[sko]

Ansible might fit your needs, however, automated deployment on anything from microsoft is a complete PITA as this gaming/advertising-platform doesn't have any proper mechanisms for automated software installations, let alone sane configuration in place (i.e. config files in standardized places that could be templated)

There are projects like e.g. chocolatey, which provide somewhat automated installation of some software, however, pushing configuration to windows hosts in a sane/safe/reliable way is simply impossible...
If you have somewhat static windows clients or can move a lot of software to a sane OS to make the windows installations as small as possible, you might be better off providing a 'master' VM image that gets pre-installed and updated manually and then deploy that through ansible and some scripting to the (unix or linux based) clients. zfs snapshots are a nice way of doing that - the deltas are relatively small after the initial VM image (zvol) has been transferred, then just clone the zvol for using in a VM and nuke+reclone when a new image is available.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

+1 for Ansible - as both free and supporting Win and Linux (including Deb) packages.
If you want something easier for windows to use, you could try one of the tools mentioned here:

6 Best Free Software Deployment Tool For Windows

These software deployment tool let you install, update, or uninstall single or multiple software on single or multiple remote computers.

listoffreeware.com

p.s: seems like FusionInventory supports both platforms as well.

 

[oneplane]

Perhaps a description of what you imagine this tool to be doing would help.

Package management is very different from State management and that again is different from Continuous Delivery.

If you are looking for basic state and package management you might be better off checking:

- SaltStack
- Ansible
- Chef
- Puppet

But if you are looking for in-OS CD (Continuous Delivery) you'd probably want to check out:

- GitHub Actions
- Drone
- Tekton
- Maybe even Nomad

Most of those you'd combine with SSH.

 

[Jo@devops]

I'd prefer free. But depending on the price, I could buy it.
I can't see a price on Octopus Deploy though.

Here is pricing information for Octopus: Octopus Deploy Pricing for Cloud or Self-hosted - Octopus Deploy
We have a free Community version to be deployed on your own infrastructure.
You can also try our free trial.

 

[Jo@devops]

Yes, Octopus can manage both Windows and Linux.

 

[sdemx]

If Jenkins wasn't your thing and you need something that works with both Windows and Linux, I'd check out Ansible. It's open source, pretty straightforward to use, and handles software deployment across platforms, including Debian. Ansible lets you automate tasks and manage configurations without a lot of fuss.

Another option is GitLab's CI/CD pipelines. It's geared more toward developers, but there's a free tier, and it supports a ton of deployment tasks, including software build processes and continuous integration.