GLPI is the French acronym for Gestionnaire Libre de Parc Informatique — the free IT asset manager. Born in 2003 at the INDEPNET association, it became a Teclib’ product in 2015 and, on 1º October 2025, reached version 11. In June 2026 the community stable release is 11.0.8; 10.0 still receives fixes. Here is the timeline, without the “free ITIL” folklore.
IRMA, INDEPNET, and 0.2
Jean-Mathieu Doléans was president of INDEPNET, a French free-software association aimed at organizations still inventorying their assets in spreadsheets. Bazile Lebeau took the code from a project called IRMA, adapted it for his employer, and the trio — Doléans, Lebeau, and, from 2004, Julien Dombre — repackaged it, translated it, rebuilt the interface, and gave it a new name. Doléans himself, on the Projets Libres 20-year anniversary podcast, says it was not just a label change. It was refactoring. The first stable public version is 0.2, 17 November 2003, GPL. The GitHub CHANGELOG still contains 0.21 from 2 December that year, with an SQL migration script — the habit of glpi-X-TO-Y.sql was already there.
The initial audience was small and medium businesses and associations in France. The Open Source Award in the security category that same year appears on Teclib’s official timeline. Julien Dombre joined in 2004: laboratory engineer, asset manager, “interested” in the literal sense — he needed the tool.
From 0.5 to 0.78: entities, ITIL, OCS
0.5 (29 Apr 2005), 0.6, 0.65, 0.68. On 21 December 2007 0.70 delivered what still sells the product in the public sector: multi-entity support — one GLPI, multiple asset inventories, isolation. Version 0.78 (12 October 2010) declared ITIL compatibility: tickets, assignment, SLA in service desk vocabulary. Detailed inventory — machines, monitors, printers, software, contracts — was already the core; the helpdesk grew around it.
The inventory agent at first was the embedded OCS Inventory NG . In August 2013, 0.84 removed “OCS mode” from the core and moved it to the plugin ocsinventoryng: coordinating GLPI×OCS releases had become a maintenance nightmare. In February 2010 at FOSDEM, FusionInventory was born — an agent (formerly OCS Unix) + SNMP/discovery plugin for GLPI, deliberately using the OCS XML protocol. For a decade, GLPI + FusionInventory was the standard package for those who did not want SCCM.
Teclib’: from Gold to publisher
Teclib’ appeared in 2009 as an integrator, a Gold partner, then Platinum in 2011 — the same year Teclib counted 1 million downloads. A French company; its current about page says it was founded in 2011 and has “more than 60 people”. On 26 March 2015 Teclib's website announced that the project was “accelerating in a new home”. That summer, INDEPNET's community leadership handed the roadmap and R&D to Teclib, which became the publisher. The code remained GPL. The GitHub glpi-project/glpi was created on 16 July 2015 — the old forge was forge.indepnet.net.
On 9 October 2015 came 0.90, the last of the 0.x series. On 23 September 2016, 9.1 dropped the leading zero. Plugins, translation (Transifex), partner network. In 2019, GLPI Network Cloud. On 7 July 2020, 9.5 brought the Marketplace — plugins were no longer just manually handled tarballs.
Native inventory, GPL-3, the Agent
Version 10.0 (20 April 2022) redesigned the interface and put native inventory in the core, with the GLPI Agent. The XML format still speaks the FusionInventory/OCS language. In May 2022 Teclib published a mea culpa: the core was GPL-2.0-or-later, FusionInventory was AGPL-3.0-or-later, and the previous project's copyright had not been properly credited. The fix: source credits and changing GLPI's license to GPL-3.0-or-later (v2’s “or later” allowed the jump; GPL-3 and AGPL-3 work together). Nothing changes for those who only use GLPI. Those deriving code move to GPL-3-compatible terms. The Agent remains on GitHub glpi-project/glpi-agent — 1.19 in August 2026, with experimental support for 12.
GLPI 10, twenty years, GLPI 11
Version 10.0 is the “modern” look most installations still run. In 2023 the project turned 20. On 30 September 2025 the official blog proclaimed “GLPI 11 is out”; the GitHub tag 11.0.0 is dated 1º October 2025. Highlights of the major release:
- native custom assets (formerly Generic Object + Fields through plugins)
- forms in the core, interactive editor
- new self-service portal
- 2FA
- webhooks
- High-Level API
On 24 June 2026 came the simultaneous release of 11.0.8 and 10.0.26 — both are still security branches. Version 12.0.0-rc1 (3 Sep 2026) is a prerelease: redesigned knowledge base, sessions manager, sudo mode. Not for production.
GLPI 11 requires PHP 8.2+; in practice, 8.3/8.4/8.5 on FPM. The guide to multiple versions on this blog: Nginx and various PHP versions.
What GLPI is — and what it is not
ITAM (inventory, contracts, licenses, data centers) + ITSM (tickets, problems, changes, projects) + knowledge base + reservations. Multi-entity. LDAP. It is the Zabbix for tickets, not ICMP — Zabbix measures; GLPI records who owns the laptop and who opened the ticket. Nagios pages you. GLPI closes the ticket.
The most important comparison when choosing is with OTRS and its forks: both open tickets, but they start from opposite places. OTRS began as an email queue — the mailbox is the entry point, and inventory was never the focus. GLPI began as inventory — the helpdesk grew around assets. If your problem is “who answered this email and how quickly”, choose OTRS or Znuny. If it is “whose laptop is this, what is its warranty, and what tickets has it generated”, choose GLPI.
The community edition (GitHub, GPL-3) is the software. GLPI Network is a Teclib subscription: official plugins, support, cloud. The core is not held hostage by the subscription. In Brazil the official website lists Grupo DPSP (pharmacies) and Consórcio DPZ (Pernambuco) as Network case studies — French public-sector organizations and universities were the original foundation.
Running today, on your Linux
The practical question for readers arriving here: I want asset inventory and tickets — what do I install in 2026? The answer is GLPI 11, with the GLPI Agent on the machines. Two pieces, in that order.
The server
Applies to Debian 12/13 and Ubuntu 24.04/26.04. GLPI 11 requires PHP 8.2 or newer:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y nginx mariadb-server
php-fpm php-mysql php-mbstring php-curl php-gd php-xml php-intl
php-ldap php-zip php-bz2 php-bcmath
# banco
sudo mariadb -e "CREATE DATABASE glpi CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;"
sudo mariadb -e "CREATE USER 'glpi'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'troque-esta-senha';"
sudo mariadb -e "GRANT ALL ON glpi.* TO 'glpi'@'localhost'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"
# o GLPI precisa das timezones carregadas no MariaDB, ou reclama na instalação
sudo mariadb-tzinfo-to-sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | sudo mariadb mysql
sudo mariadb -e "GRANT SELECT ON mysql.time_zone_name TO 'glpi'@'localhost';"# baixe a versão estável do GitHub e confira o checksum publicado no release
cd /tmp
VER=11.0.8
curl -fLO https://github.com/glpi-project/glpi/releases/download/${VER}/glpi-${VER}.tgz
sudo tar xzf glpi-${VER}.tgz -C /var/www/
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/glpiA security detail many installations overlook: only the directory public/ should be served over the web. The rest — config/, files/, marketplace/ — stays outside the vhost root:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
http2 on;
server_name glpi.exemplo.com.br;
root /var/www/glpi/public;
client_max_body_size 100m;
location / {
try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
}
location ~ ^/index.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock;
}
}sudo systemctl reload nginx
# abra https://glpi.exemplo.com.br/install/install.phpAfter browser-based installation, delete the installer and change the default passwords — GLPI creates four well-known accounts (glpi, tech, normal, post-only), all with passwords matching their usernames:
sudo rm -f /var/www/glpi/install/install.phpAnd cron, without which notifications, email collection, and automatic tasks simply do not run:
echo '* * * * * www-data /usr/bin/php /var/www/glpi/front/cron.php'
| sudo tee /etc/cron.d/glpiThe agent on the machines
The GLPI Agent (1.19, from August 2026) populates the inventory automatically. It runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS and speaks the same XML inherited from FusionInventory:
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install -y glpi-agent
# aponte para o servidor
sudo sed -i 's|^#?server =.*|server = https://glpi.exemplo.com.br/front/inventory.php|'
/etc/glpi-agent/agent.cfg
sudo systemctl enable --now glpi-agent
# forçar um inventário agora, para conferir
sudo glpi-agent --forceFor devices that cannot run an agent — switches, network printers, UPS units — the path is discovery through SNMP, configured in GLPI's own panel.
Or in a container
There is no official image maintained by Teclib’, but community images get a lab running in minutes. For production, prefer the installation above: you will want control over the PHP version, cron, and backups of files/.
Backup
# banco
sudo mysqldump --single-transaction glpi | gzip > /var/backups/glpi-$(date +%F).sql.gz
# documentos anexados e configuração — esquecer isto é o erro clássico
sudo tar czf /var/backups/glpi-files-$(date +%F).tar.gz -C /var/www/glpi files configTimeline
- 17/nov/2003 — GLPI 0.2, first stable public release (GPL), at INDEPNET
- 2004 — Julien Dombre joins the project
- 2005 — The 0.5 series
- 21/dez/2007 — 0.70: multi-entity support
- 2010 — FOSDEM: FusionInventory is born; 0.78 declares ITIL compatibility
- 2015 — Teclib’ becomes the publisher; repository moves to GitHub; 0.90 is released
- 2016 — GLPI 9.1 (end of the leading “0.”)
- 2020 — 9.5 brings the Marketplace
- 20/abr/2022 — 10.0: native inventory (GLPI Agent); license changes to GPL-3
- 2023 — GLPI turns 20
- 1º/out/2025 — GLPI 11 (custom assets, forms in the core, 2FA, webhooks)
- 24/jun/2026 — 11.0.8 and 10.0.26 (security branches); 12.0.0-rc1 in testing
Wrap-up
A rewritten IRMA, a four-letter name, an association, a publisher. PHP and MariaDB, tickets and assets. Version 0.2 fit in a laboratory; 11 inventories whatever asset you invent. The git repository is github.com/glpi-project/glpi. Still on 9.5? The jump is to 10, then 11 — do not skip the intermediate step without reading the migration changelog.
Teclib 20 years / CHANGELOG 0.2: Historical CHANGELOG.txt · Teclib 2015 announcement: Teclib becomes the cradle · license: About GLPI license · GLPI 10: 20 Apr 2022 · GLPI 11: glpi-project.org · 11.0.8: GitHub · INDEPNET podcast: Projets Libres #07.