How to install and configure Cockpit on CenOS8

Served over HTTPS and behind a reverse proxy

This article assumes that your server has a public IP address and a DNS record associated with said IP. Of course you should also have administrative privileges. If the server resides within your corporate network, then most likely you’ll be able create a record yourself or request one from somebody else. In such scenario self-signed or CA-issued certificates will be the way to go. However, this article will not cover such use case.

The installation really boils down to two commands. The first one installs all of the required packages and the second one enables and starts cockpit. If you’re running a full version (as opposed to minimal), cockpit should be already installed.

There a two things that need to be done for cockpit to work behind a proxy. First of all we must set allowed Origins, so our requests will not be denied. The other thing would be to set the ProtocolHeader option, so cockpit will know that the connection is secure. The full configuration file is just three lines long. Paste them into /etc/cockpit/cockpit.conf and restart the socket.

In this article I showed how to install cockpit and hide it behind nginx acting as a reverse proxy. The setup was fairly simple and should be enough to get you started on exploring cockpit and utilizing it to the fullest.

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