Webmin on Artix

Webmin
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I have been moving our entire enterprise and all our clients from Corpo-Linux onto Artix.

Virtually the only pain point is Webmin which is not (yet?) a first class citizen there.

I noted today that in Webmin’s GitHub Releases Webmin now seems to have a “full” version as a .tar.gz file whereas in the past the received wisdom was that one needed to use a repo for a “full” installation or manually install a “skeleton” and then add plugins as needed.

Can someone (Jamie Cameron?) chime in on the best practice to install Webmin on a distro where it is not a first-class citizen?

I’m guessing I could expand the .tar.gz release file, run .setup.sh and then figure out a bespoke openrc init script to have Webmin launch automatically. [ Indeed, I can likely just copy what I have on an existing Artix system with an older version of Webmin. ]

[Note: Attempting to install webmin-openrc by itself coaxes a bunch of complaints about dependencies … but installing Webmin from Artix’s repos is a nonstarter at the moment.

You can read some of my experience here: https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,9090.0.html

I’m hoping to help Artix get Webmin into a truly usable status, but not many Artix users seem to care about Webmin … yet. ]

Thanks in advance for any insights!

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You’ve misunderstood something.

There has always been a full Webmin tarball. There has also been (but it came a few years later, the full tarball was there first) a Webmin minimal tarball with most modules removed , intended for people building a custom distribution of Webmin, usually with custom modules…e.g. for embedded builds and the like, not really intended for end users. The minimal tarball of Webmin has never been recommended for general use…it is the building block for some custom Webmin, not a thing you just install and use. The tarball version of Webmin has a setup script that works on a huge number of Linux/UNIX systems, but in cases where there is a package for your OS, you should use the package for your OS rather than the tarball. We provide packages for the most popular distributions, but don’t have the resources to cover everything.

As I understand it, Artix is a fork of Arch Linux? If that’s the case, you should obviously take a look at the Arch aur package for Webmin, maybe basing your new Artix package on that. Presumably it packages the tarball along with various configuration changes and a start script/config of the appropriate sort. Webmin - ArchWiki

None of us (including Jamie) has experience with Arch or Artix, so you’ll need to do the work yourself in terms of packaging for Artix. Usually, the process of adding support for a new OS is making sure the OS is detected correctly (webmin/os_list.txt at master · webmin/webmin · GitHub), then make sure there are config files for your OS (or related OS, if the services have all the same paths and conventions on an already supported OS). For example, this is a config for Apache on debian: webmin/apache/config-debian-linux-10.0-ALL at master · webmin/webmin · GitHub

Every service has a config. That’s the largest work of adding support for a new OS to Webmin. It’s a lot of files. For derivative systems, you might be able to just have Webmin detect as the same, or you might be able to copy all the configs and make minor tweaks.

We welcome PRs, if you want to do the OS detection and config file work. And, I’m happy to answer questions.

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I’ll also note I’m surprised there is an aur package. We’ve never had anyone send in config files for Arch, so we don’t detect it or have configs for it. I’m surprised they wouldn’t want to upstream the work, if they’d done the work to make Webmin work on Arch.