Supported Remote Platforms

While Exosphere itself is generally as platform agnostic as possible, it is limited in what operating systems and platforms it can manage and query. This is broadly limited to Unix-like platforms, including Linux and BSD variants.

There are two tiers of effective support in Exosphere.

  1. Full Support: Allows connectivity checks, update and patch reporting, and detailed host information gathering.

  2. Limited Support: For unsupported platforms that are still Unix-like, Exosphere is limited to basic SSH connectivity checks and presence in the dashboard.

Platform support for Patches and Updates are implemented via an extensible provider system, which allows for new platforms to be added in the future.

If your remote operating system does not have a provider, you can still use Exosphere for the basic SSH ping connectivity checks and Dashboard. They will show up in the inventory, but no patch and update reporting features will be available, as long as it is a unix-like operating system and obeys basic POSIX standards.

Unfortunately, this excludes exotic things such as Windows, routers with SSH enabled but proprietary, non-Unix-like operating systems, etc. Discovery will not work at all for these systems, and they should probably not be added to the inventory.

Compatibility List

✅ Exosphere fully supports the following platforms:

Debian-based Systems

  • Debian (all versions)

  • Ubuntu and derivatives (Mint, Pop!_OS, etc.)

  • Package Manager: apt only

Red Hat-based Systems

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

  • CentOS / CentOS Stream

  • AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux

  • Fedora

  • Package Managers: yum (RHEL/CentOS 7 and earlier) or dnf (modern systems)

BSD Systems

  • FreeBSD (all supported versions and minor variants)

  • OpenBSD (all supported versions)

  • Package Managers: pkg (FreeBSD), pkg_add (OpenBSD)

note

FreeBSD Optionally requires the sudo package for repository sync operations. Unfortunately doas is not supported at this time.

☑️ Exosphere has limited support for the following platforms:

  • Other Linux distributions (e.g., Arch Linux, Gentoo, NixOS, etc.)

  • Other BSD systems (e.g. NetBSD)

  • Other Unix-like systems (e.g., Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Mac OS)

The bar for entry is fairly low to fit this description, as long as it can be connected to via SSH and returns something useful via uname -s, it will work here.

❌ Exosphere explicitly does not support the following platforms:

  • Windows (all versions, but WSL over SSH is supported)

  • Network Equipment with proprietary operating systems (e.g., Cisco IOS, Juniper JunOS)

  • Other non-Unix-like operating systems that support SSH

Tip

If your preferred platform is not supported, contributions to add new providers are welcome! See the developer documentation for details on implementing new providers.

Common Prerequisites

All supported platforms share the same basic requirements, as Exosphere operates entirely through SSH connections and standard system utilities.

Essential Requirements

  • SSH access to the remote host (with an SSH agent for authentication)

  • Package manager binaries installed and available in $PATH (typically pre-installed)

  • Standard UNIX utilities such as grep, awk, and cut (universally available)

Optional Requirements

  • Elevated privileges for certain operations on some platforms (i.e. root)

  • sudo installed on the remote host (if needed) and configured properly

See below for more details.

Network Requirements

  • Outbound internet access from managed hosts, at least to the package repositories

  • SSH connectivity between your workstation and managed hosts

Some providers may require elevated privileges to perform certain operations, but this is entirely optional.

More details about all of this are available in the Connections and Privileges section.

Note

Check out the Providers Documentation for more details on each provider, including the exact commands that are run.