Hello Folks,
We are trying to search for manual installation of Pulp 3 without using container runtime as we don’t have much resources and ansible galaxy collection is already deprecated.
Mainly we are looking the steps for installing and configuring pulp3 with backend, frontend UI server. Is there any way we can setup Pulp server manually ?
Hoping to hear from you !
– Pradip
There can be reasons to avoid a container based installation, but “conserving resources” is not really one of them. If you use podman, installing the container runtime is essentially as easy as running dnf install podman, and the system overhead of running the container as opposed to a normal process is very much closer to nothing than to something noticeable. You might need a bit more space on your disk for storing container images but that isn’t much either if you clean up after use.
Unless you have other reasons for not wanting containers, my recommendation is very much to just try out using the containers. It is the only easy way to get started. The alternative (installing Pulp yourself using pip, or maybe using the rpm packages used for Katello) have their own limitations and are much more difficult to get working.
Thank you for the response. If we go for alternative (installing Pulp yourself using pip, or maybe using the rpm packages used for Katello), will it be feasible us to maintain, upgrade or migrate the pulp version in future (at least for 5-10 years). Also i couldn’t find any documentation on installing Pulp yourself using pip, or maybe using the rpm packages used for Katello on pulp official site. Can you share you please the doc links if any ?
Container based is the only officially supported installation method. As such there is no official documentation for anything else. The closest thing is to reverse engineer the build instructions for the official container images. For example, see the container files here and here. But those are not exactly designed to be easily human readable (at least not with respect to the entire build and configuration context). So going that route is going to be a lot of work.
There are rpm packages for select pulpcore versions that are managed here. These packages are maintained by the Foreman packaging team for use with the Foreman ecosystem. They have their own installer (“foreman-installer”) which uses Puppet to install and configure Pulp (amongst many other things). If none of this sounds familiar to you, then I really cannot recommend trying to reverse engineer the foreman-installer.
So your options are:
With regard to long term support: if you engineer your own installation instructions it is up to you to engineer your own upgrade instructions for that scenario as well. Also, it is open source so no one is making any long term support promises period. Let alone for 10 years out. That being said I expect these projects to continue for the foreseeable future. Then again, given the state of the industry as well as the wider world, please don’t try to pin me down on what exactly counts as “foreseeable future” these days. 
I’m able to setup Pulp backend server, however i cloned the pulp ui and run
npm install
API_PROXY=http://localhost:24817 npm run start
Above commands executed successfully without any issue parse when i curl http://localhost:8002 i’m getting below error:
curl http://localhost:8002
curl: (52) Empty reply from server
Our backup server is running on http://localhost:24817.
Could you please suggest me what’s i’m doing wrong here and why pulp UI is getting up?