Welcome to Ironic’s documentation!¶

Introduction¶

Ironic is an OpenStack project which provisions bare metal (as opposed to virtual) machines. It may be used independently or as part of an OpenStack Cloud, and integrates with the OpenStack Identity (keystone), Compute (nova), Network (neutron), Image (glance), and Object (swift) services.

The Bare Metal service manages hardware through both common (eg. PXE and IPMI) and vendor-specific remote management protocols. It provides the cloud operator with a unified interface to a heterogeneous fleet of servers while also providing the Compute service with an interface that allows physical servers to be managed as though they were virtual machines.

This documentation is continually updated and may not represent the state of the project at any specific prior release. To access documentation for a previous release of ironic, append the OpenStack release name to the URL; for example, the 2025.1 release is available at https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/2025.1/.

Found a bug in one of our projects? Please see Bug Reporting and Triaging Guide.

Would like to engage with the community? See Bare Metal Community.

Getting Started¶

Not sure where to begin? Find the goal that best matches yours and start with the recommended guide.

If your goal with ironic is:	Start here:
Understand and evaluate ironic for my organization	Technical overview
Install ironic standalone for a small number of nodes	Standalone installation guide
Use Ansible to install and configure nodes	Bifrost documentation
Use ironic with other OpenStack components	Integration with other OpenStack services