Install Cockpit on CentOS 7 and Oracle Linux 7

Cockpit is a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser.
Cockpit comes installed by default in Fedora 21 Server

Easy to use

Cockpit is perfect for new sysadmins, allowing them to easily perform simple tasks such as storage administration, inspecting journals and starting and stopping services.

No interference

Jumping between the terminal and the web tool is no problem. A service started via Cockpit can be stopped via the terminal. Likewise, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal Interface.

Multi-server

You can monitor and administer several servers at the same time. Just add it easily and your server will look after its buddies.

Being used to have Cockpit in my Fedora 21 Server VMs I decided that having it also on my CentOS machines would be awesome, unfortunately I quickly found that Cockpit was not available in CentOS repositories. Of course I knew that Cockpit comes installed and enabled by default in CentOS 7 Atomic host image so I figured out that those packages had to be hidden in some Atomic related repo.
After looking a bit I finally found in GitHub the sig-atomic-buildscripts repository that belongs to CentOS Project. This repository contains several scripts and files intended to build your own CentOS Atomic host including virt7-testing.repo, the Yum repository file needed for Cockpit.
Clone the GutHub repository.

git clone https://github.com/baude/sig-atomic-buildscripts

Copy virt7-testing.repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d and install Cockpit.

yum install Cockpit

Enable Cockpit service.

[root@webtest ~]# systemctl enable cockpit.socket
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/cockpit.socket' '/etc/systemd/system/sockets.target.wants/cockpit.socket'
[root@webtest ~]#

Add Cockpit to the list of trusted services in FirewallD.

[root@webtest ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=cockpit
success
[root@webtest ~]#
[root@webtest ~]# firewall-cmd --reload
success
[root@webtest ~]#
[root@webtest ~]# firewall-cmd --list-services
cockpit dhcpv6-client ssh
[root@webtest ~]#

Start Cockpit socket.

systemctl start cockpit.socket

Do no try to access Cockpit yet, there is an issue about running Cockpit on stock CentOS/RHEL 7. To be able to start it we need first to modify the service file to disable SSL.Edit file /usr/lib/systemd/system/cockpit.service and modify ExecStart line to look like this.

ExecStart=/usr/libexec/cockpit-ws --no-tls

I know this procedure will invalidate Cockpit for a production environment in RHEL7 at least for now but this is for my lab environment and I can live with it.
Reload systemd.

systemctl daemon-reload

Restart Cockpit.

systemctl restart cockpit

Access Cockpit web interface, login as root

If you already have Cockpit on your server, point your web browser to: https://ip-address-of-machine:9090