Automation the KISS way.
Ansible is a great tool for automation. But it suffers from the same problem of many such tools: a big pile of custom YAML DSL.
YAML is used to provide a declarative syntax of your automated workflow. This is nice for simple use cases, but automation can become rather complex very quickly.
Then those tools implement control flow structures (conditional execution, loops, parallelization, ...), then the ability to save values into variables.
Before you know it, you're programming in YAML. And the developer experience of such a language is terrible.
tricorder aims to fix this. It gives you a single tool to perform tasks on
multiple remotes. You then use your common UNIX tools like bash, jq, curl,
etc... to compose those tasks together.
Just like Ansible, tricorder uses an inventory file, listing the hosts to connect to:
```toml [[hosts]]
id = "backend" tags = ["server", "backend", "myapp"] address = "10.0.1.10:22" user = "admin"
[[hosts]]
id = "frontend" tags = ["server", "frontend", "myapp"] address = "10.0.1.20:22" user = "admin" ```
NB: The inventory is either a TOML file or an executable producing a JSON output. This way you can create dynamic inventories by querying a remote service or database.
Then, run one of the following commands:
$ tricorder -i /path/to/inventory do -- echo "run on all hosts"
$ tricorder -i /path/to/inventory -H backend do -- echo "run on specific host"
$ tricorder -i /path/to/inventory -t server,myapp do -- echo "run on all hosts matching tags"
NB: Authentication is done via
ssh-agentonly.
Every logging messages is written on stderr, the command result for each host
is written as a JSON document on stdout:
json
[
{
"host": "backend",
"success": false,
"error": "..."
},
{
"host": "frontend",
"success": true,
"info": {
"exit_code": 0,
"output": "..."
}
}
]
This way, you can compose this tool with jq to extract the relevant informations
in your scripts.
tricorder is also available as a Rust crate to include it directly in your software:
```rust use tricorder::core::{Inventory, Host}; use tricorder::tasks::{TaskRunner, exec}; use serde_json::json;
let inventory = Inventory::new() .addhost( Host::new("localhost".tostring(), "localhost:22".tostring()) .setuser("root".tostring()) .addtag("local".tostring()) .setvar("msg", json!("hello")) );
let task = exec::Task::new("echo \"{host.id} says {host.vars.msg}\"".tostring()); let result = inventory.hosts.runtask_seq(&task).unwrap();
println!("{}", result); ```
For more informations, consult the documentation.
Checkout the Bug Tracker.
This software is released under the terms of the MIT License.