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Install

This guide explains how to use the Forseti installation tool.

Before you begin

Before you run the setup wizard, you will need:

  • A Google Cloud Platform (GCP) organization you want to deploy Forseti for.
  • An Organization Administrator Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) role so the script can assign the Forseti service account roles on the organization Cloud IAM policy.
  • A GCP project dedicated to Forseti. You can reuse the same project that has Forseti 1.0 installed in it.
  • Enable billing on the project.

Setting up Forseti Security

The installer automatically determines setup information, generates a deployment template, and creates a Forseti deployment.

Terraform installation

Starting from Forseti v2.11.0, users will be able to install Forseti using Terraform. Documentation on installing can be found here.

Activate Google Cloud Shell

It’s best to use Cloud Shell to run the Forseti installer. This ensures you’re using the latest version of Cloud SDK since it’s included in Cloud Shell. To prepare to run the Forseti setup wizard, follow the steps below:

  1. Go to the GCP Console.
  2. In the Select a project drop-down list at the top of the console, select the project you want to deploy Forseti to.
  3. On the top right, click the icon to Activate Google Cloud Shell. The Cloud Shell panel opens at the bottom of the page.

Run setup

  1. After you’ve started Cloud Shell, download Forseti. The installer is included in the install/ directory:

     git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/forseti-security.git
  2. Check out the specific version of Forseti you want to install by using a tag like v2.14.0.: 
     # Make sure you are in the forseti-security folder.
 cd forseti-security

 # If the tag exists in the remote repository but you are unable to checkout the tag,
 # run command `git fetch --all` to fetch all the latest branch/tag information and run
 # the checkout command again.
 git checkout tags/v2.14.0

  3. Install both client and server by running the installer:

    python install/gcp_installer.py

    If you don’t plan to share your Forseti instance with other non-administrators, you can choose to install the server instance only and access Forseti from there.

    python install/gcp_installer.py --type=server

    Installing Forseti on multiple roots by specifying the roots using --composite-root-resources flag.

    # Example command to have forseti running on project a and folder b.
python install/gcp_installer.py --composite-root-resources "projects/a,folders/b"

    You can read more about the composite root resources here.

    To see additional configurations for the setup, run the following:

    python install/gcp_installer.py -h

  4. The installer will infer the necessary information to install Forseti.

    If you ran the install/gcp_installer.py without extra flags, you will be prompted to enter the following:

    • SendGrid API key [Optional]: Used for sending email via SendGrid. For more information, see how to enable email notifications.
    • Email recipient [Optional]: If you provide a SendGrid API key, you will also be asked to whom Forseti should send the email notifications.

    • G Suite super admin email [Optional]: This is part of the G Suite data collection. Ask your G Suite Admin if you don’t know the super admin email.

      The following functionalities will not work without G Suite integration:

      • G Suite groups and users in Inventory
      • Group Scanner
      • Group expansion in Explain

  5. After you install the server, a cron job automatically runs every other hour to get the latest configuration file and execute the following commands on your Cloud Storage bucket:

    MODEL_ID=$(/bin/date -u +%Y%m%dT%H%M%S)
forseti inventory create --import_as ${MODEL_ID}
forseti model use ${MODEL_ID}
forseti scanner run
forseti notifier run

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