Turnkey Linux is an open source project developing a free virtual appliances library that features the very best server-oriented open source software. Each virtual appliance is optimized for ease of use and can be deployed in just a few minutes on bare metal, a virtual machine and in the cloud.
Why? Because everything that can be easy, should be easy.
Why Virtual Appliances?
Packaging a solution as a virtual appliances can be incredibly useful because it allows you to leverage guru integration skills to build ready to use systems (I.e., turn key solutions) that just work out of the box with little to no setup.
TurnKey Linux is a Debian-based virtual appliances library that integrates some of the best open-source software into ready-to-use solutions. Each virtual appliances is optimised for ease of use and can be deployed in just a few minutes on bare metal, a virtual machine and in the cloud.
The growing list of virtual appliances, each of which is available as a CD image or virtual machine image, include Bugzilla, Django, Drupal, File Server, Joomla, LAMP, Magento, Mantis, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, Moodle, MovableType, MySQL, Openbravo, phpBB, PostgreSQL, ProjectPier, Rails, Revision Control, StatusNet, Apache Tomcat, Torrent Server, Trac, TWiki, vtiger, WordPress, Zimra and others.
- 100+ ready-to-use solutions: discover and leverage the best free software. Deploy solutions quickly on bare metal, virtual appliances, or in the cloud.
- Free as in speech: free software with full source code and a powerful build system. Free of hidden backdoors, free from restrictive licensing and free to learn from, modify and distribute.
- Secure and easy to maintain: auto-updated daily with latest security patches.
- 1-click backup and restore: smart backup software saves changes to files, databases and package management to encrypted storage which servers can be automatically restored from.
- It just works: designed for ease of use, built and tested collaboratively by the community.
- Based on Debian 8 (“Jessie”): with automatic security updates for over 37,500 packages.
TurnKey GNU/Linux is licensed under the same terms as Debian. In other words, you are free to download, use, distribute and modify any solution or component for any purpose.
- Easy to use: includes a web management interface, web shell, and simple configuration console (screenshots).
- Lightweight (starting from 150MB): each solution is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to serve its role with maximum efficiency and security.
- Assured integrity: solutions are built from verifiably unmodified Debian binaries, except for a few custom components for which full source code is available. Releases are cryptographically signed. See the FAQ.
About Turnkey Linux
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 virtual source alternatives to proprietary virtual appliances 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.
TurnKey’s virtual appliances start life as a “stripped down” Debian bootstrap (versions previous to v12.0 based on Ubuntu.) 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 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.
See also
- About TurnKey – an overview of what we do and why we’re doing it
- Testimonials – see what people are saying about TurnKey Linux
- Screenshots – see what TurnKey looks like
- TurnKey Core – common base image for all virtual appliances
- TurnKey Hub – on-demand cloud storage and server deployment
- TKLBAM – smart automated backup and migration
- TKLDev – self-contained TurnKey build system
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