Fedora Server Documentation
Our Mission
As a user, you gain the opportunity to use the server of the future right now.
Fedora Server provides a stable, flexible and universally adaptable basis for the everyday provision of digital services and information, suitable for use by all kinds of organizations and individuals. It is based on the latest technology and as such, brings the most modern environment to users as early as possible.
As a developer or system integrator, you preview the server of the future.
Fedora Server is a platform for developers and system integrators, providing an implementation of the latest server technology for further evaluation and practical use.
What You Will Find Here
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Server installation and administration guides
You find information about installation and basic system administration supplementing the general Fedora Installation Guide and System Administration Guide. Several other sections cover specific Fedora Server Edition related options and solutions. This includes virtualisation and containerization in particular.
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Example Use Cases
Users describe how they use Fedora Server for a wide variety of tasks as well as solutions for special tasks. Hopefully, this will provide inspiration for your own assignments.
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Tutorials
Detailed step-by-step instructions are given for various typical areas of application. The tutorials are intended to enable not only experienced system administrators but also inexperienced users to safely install and configure the system.
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People, policies, and working methods
Updating to Fedora 41
The recommended procedure is upgrading using the DNF System Upgrade plugin. This applies to Fedora Server Edition on hardware as well as in a virtual machine.
Before you start the process you should use df -h to check the root file system. You need about 2-3 gb free space depending on your installation to store the rpm packages of the F41 release.
Please note that for an interactive remote installation, you must also add the parameter nomodeset to the kernel command line. For more information, see the corresponding installation instructions.
Updating to Fedora 40
The recommended procedure is upgrading using the DNF System Upgrade plugin. This applies to Fedora Server Edition on hardware as well as in a virtual machine.
Before you start the process you should use df -h to check the root file system. You need about 2-3 gb free space depending on your installation to store the rpm packages of the F40 release.
Note that the configuration of LVM has changed. The CLI commands now only take into account partitions that are listed in lvmdevices.
If you use postgresql, please note that the major version has increased from 15.6 to 16.1. This means that the database tables need to be adapted.
Why Use Fedora Server
Fedora Server Edition offers users and system administrators several attractive features:
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You get the latest software almost immediately: Fedora Server’s biannual release cycle allows for the inclusion of the latest versions of system and application software almost immediately. This empowers users and system administrators to swiftly respond to new market options and changing or expanding customer requirements.
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You can trust it: Fedora Server has a sophisticated and highly engineered release and quality assurance process, which enables a high level of reliability and stability, despite a comparatively fast release cycle. It therefore achieves an excellent balance between 'bleeding edge' and maturity for productive use in mainstream deployments.
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Confidence in security: Enterprise-grade security minded, the Fedora release engineering results in carefully pre-configured releases, offering uncompromising security without prior extensive configuration by system administrators.
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You can get what you need: Fedora Server has an extensive collection of available packages, all of them subject to the same extensive release process. This opens up a wide range of possibilities for building a server very flexibly according to customer specific needs and wishes.
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It will help ease a sysadmin workload: Fedora Server includes the latest stable versions of modern sysadmin tools (i.e. cockpit, dnf, systemd), noticeably reducing the burden of system administration.
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Less disruption with upgrades: Fedora Server’s short release cycle means less disruptive release jumps. There is a very easy update process without re-installation requirements. There is also the option to skip one release cycle in case new capabilities are not immediately needed. Several small updates are easier to manage than a few big updates.
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You’ve got the freedom you want: Fedora Server allows utmost freedom from restrictions imposed by commercial interests or corporate feature management, combined with excellent backward hardware compatibility (including a complete set of standard kernel drivers).
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Developers will feel right at home: Fedora Server is an excellent development environment for the next generation server as well as application software with the latest software versions available.
What’s in the Pipeline?
Currently, several projects are in development:
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Further Improvements to the documentation
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Facilitation of the deployment of key services by combining rpm and Ansible
You Are Welcome to Contribute
You don’t have to be a programmer, a developer or a technical nerd to contribute to the development of Fedora Server. We are especially interested in feedback from our users and potential new users.
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Please, tell us about your usage of Fedora Server
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Tell us about problems you found and how you resolved it
The easiest way is to write on our mailing list. It is a low traffic list specifically for Fedora Server Edition. It is open to everyone.
Another option is our ticket system at https://pagure.io/fedora-server/issues. However, this requires a FAS account, which you can create at Fedora accounts
You can also chat with us at #fedora-server on libera.chat.
For additional information refer to Getting in Touch
About previous versions of Fedora Server
Installing Fedora 39
There is an issue with the aarch64 SBC installation image. You can’t use a Fedora Server Edition host to transfer the distribution image onto a SD card. Use Fedora Workstation or any other non-LVM system.
Updating to Fedora 39
The recommended procedure is upgrading using the DNF System Upgrade plugin. This applies to Fedora Server Edition on hardware as well as in a virtual machine.
Before you start the process you should use df -h to check the root file system. You need about 2-3 gb free space depending on your installation to store the rpm packages of the F39 release.
Updating to Fedora 38
The recommended procedure is upgrading using the DNF System Upgrade plugin. This applies to Fedora Server Edition on hardware as well as in a virtual machine.
Before you start the process you should use df -h to check the root file system. You need about 2-3 gb free space depending on your installation to store the rpm packages of the F38 release.
Updating to Fedora 37
Upgrading using the dnf upgrade process is fully tested and supported. No issues were found during the release tests.
With release 37 we additionally deliver a Fedora Server KVM virtual disk image. Now it’s much easier to provision a Fedora server with virtual machines.
The Fedora KVM image resembles a standard Fedora Server installation as close as possible. An administrator should not detect any differences in the work routines - except for hardware specific actions, of course. For details see the supplemented user documentation Creating a virtual machine using Fedora Server Edition disk image.
Updating to Fedora 36
Upgrading using the dnf upgrade process is fully tested and supported. No issues were found during the release tests.
A major change relates to the network configuration. It requires a manual adjustment until the next release. But no need to hurry.
For new installations, configuration files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections replace the previous ifcfg files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. The latter are still supported in this release for existing installations. Therefore, updating is undisturbed and the recommended procedure. The next release will remove the support. Therefore, the configuration must be transferred to the new location. This requires system administrator intervention, there is no automatic process set up. Instructions are available in the article "From ifcfg to keyfiles: modernizing NetworkManager configuration in Fedora Linux 36" in Fedora Magazine.
Other major changes are associated with the new Ansible Release 5. However, no particular problems were found in the tests.
We recommend studying the Release Notes whether any change affects a specific installation.
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