disco

Dead Simple COnfiguration management and continuous integration for linux like systems

DISCO is just now beginning development. Expect what you find here to do irreparable damage to any system you run it on. I ONLY run disco on a throwaway VM at current.

Why disco?

Because puppet, chef, cfengine, etc, are all great tools, but they all fall short of the mark, in terms of simplicity, ease of use, and reliability. None of them really follow the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing, do it well, and don't reinvent the wheel".

No, really, why did you name it "disco"?

I wanted an acronym based off of "Dead Simple Continuous Integration", and this was the closest I found.

Requirements

DISCO assumes that you:

- have at least one server capable of running rsyncd, sshd and bash 4+
- have one or more clients capable of running bash 4+, ssh, rsync, and fuse-unionfs

While that's a very simple requirements list, it currently restricts it to recent Linux systems. You may or may not be able to use this tool on FreeBSD or Mac OS X, I haven't tried. Due to the way it executes, this tool will probably never, ever execute properly on Windows.

Why focus so much on linux?

Because if we try to do everything and the kitchen sink, for every OS out there, we run the risk of falling short in the same ways the other CI tools have. By limiting our scope and problem space to recent GNU/Linux systems, we can write a much simpler tool in a much shorter amount of time that is much simpler to understand.

Is DISCO noop friendly (report all incoming changes)?

Yes, DISCO is noop friendly, with a caveat: The way we implement noop is through restricted bash shells. This is generally sufficient, and already proven and simple.

There are some questions around "is the NOOP really secure then?" Well, yes and no.

Unlike puppet's noop, which is implemented via a guaranteed safe DSL, DISCO assumes an existing trust network between your disco server and disco client; the goal of DISCO noop is to prevent well-meaning trusted sysadmins from doing really stupid things. It does not try to secure your systems from malicious code. That security layer is moved up, onto the maintainer, who must verify the sanity of all code they are sending to client machines.

How do you handle parameters (like puppet ENC, etc)?

DISCO uses a section of the filesystem to layout a tree of pathable, walkable parameters. This part of the filesystem is available to the client at execution time, so these variables can be used in scripts, templates, and definition files, to further customize execution based off of parameters. This lives on the SERVER, not the client.

From the server perspective, the parameters tree looks like:

/var/disco/parameters ___ ___ disco ___ ___ ___ client ___ ___ ___ ___ cmds ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ rsync ___ ___ server ___ ___ ___ uri ___ ___ NODE_NAME ___ ___ ___ modules ___ ___ ___ ___ ... ___ ___ ___ parameters ___ ___ ___ ___ ...

Think of it like a large JSON document expressed as a filesystem, with the document keys the filenames, and the values being their contents. This format was chosen because it can be easily created from any number of other existing datasources, and doesn't tie DISCO to any one particular tool (cobbler, etc). The admin is free to create this structure on the server however they please.

Given this, disco does not use a config file, all configuration parameters are present in this tree.

There are only two possible toplevel paths, /disco and /NODE_NAME. NODE_NAME is equal to the FQDN of the client making a request, and /disco is the internal client/server configuration. The parameter tree is transmitted from the server to the client via (yet another) rsync operation, and is accessible as a filesystem tree (or the disco-param command which is just a bash wrapper). These parameters appear in /var/disco/parameters on the client and server, and default values can be found there in the client/server install before the first run of the client.

/disco/client/cmds/rsync : The rsync command to use when synching files. The source and destination paths will be appended directly to this string. /disco/server/uri : The rsync URI from which to fetch module definitions. /disco/NODE_NAME/modules : This list defines the modules to install on a given node. /disco/NODE_NAME/parameters : This tree defines all configuration parameters for the node not related to any module in particular.

Some special parameters are provided to the client, that do not exist on the paramters tree until runtime:

/disco/NODE_NAME/current_module : This parameter defines the full name of the current module, such that a module definition file can access its personal parameters via without knowing its name, e.g.: $(disco-param get /classes/$(disco-param get /current_module)/some/module/specific/path)

How to deploy stuff

DISCO uses rsync(+ssh) to distribute files, and bash to execute supporting scripts. It has a rudimentary dependency mechanism implemented via a topological sort.

Essentially, to deploy something, you need 3 things:

- some files and templates on an rsync server
- some scripts that may or may not do something with those files and templates
- a definition file saying where to get those files, templates and scripts, and which
  order to apply them in, as well as what other things you need deployed before this thing

Scripts

DISCO uses bash for a scripting and templating engine. Instead of writing a custom DSL that lets you specify operations (like Puppet did) or utilize a higher level language (like Chef did with ruby), DISCO just uses the proven bash shell.

Files vs Templates

Files and Templates are delivered exactly the same way - via rsync.

Files are static files who are delivered on to the disk, and no more operations are done to them.

Templates are bash scripts who are delivered on to the disk, and then they are executed, with their file contents replaced by their output. Templates are subject to all the same restrictions as scripts (be mindful of the constraints of $NOOP), and in addition, they are ALWAYS interpolated in the safe NOOP execution environment (file modifications will be discarded, and only rudimentary bash builtins are enabled). Templates have access to all client parameters via the disco-param command.

Definition Files

Definition files are just a series of files that say where to rsync files, templates, and scripts from.

Definition files can use node parameters via the $(disco-param /path/to/node/parameter) syntax. This interpolation is done on the client side, so the server does not execute any code for this. This is useful for when a module needs to pull different files or whatever depending on its branch, release name, whatever.

Module Layout

A disco module (also called a "disco ball" for fun) looks like this:

MODULE ├── defs │__ ├── files │__ ├── scripts │__ └── templates ___ ___ parameters ├── files ├── scripts └── templates

Your module can theoretically pull files, scripts, and templates from any location that can be reached via rsync; however, it is generally considerd good form to include all things relevant to your module, inside its disco ball. The disco ball is then placed in an accessible location on the rsync server, and the disco client will pull all modules, files, scripts, and templates relevant to its execution, and run them.

MODULE/defs/files

Consists of a number of rsync locations to pull files from. For each line of the file, the format is:

SOURCE_PATH[:DEST_ROOT]

... SOURCE_PATH is a rsync+ssh URI passed directly to the rsync command (as defined in parameter disco/client/cmds/rsync). DEST_ROOT is optional; if not present, all files retrieved are rooted into /. You can use this to change this behavior to root incoming files to a different LOCAL PATH; remote paths are not supported!

MODULE/defs/templates

This file has an identical syntax to MODULE/defs/files, except that it lists templates, not files. These files are fetched exactly like the others, but once fetched, they are templated and replaced with the template output.

MODULE/defs/scripts

This file simply lists the (local) location of commands to execute, for this module, once all scripts have been fetched, and all templates have been interpolated. They are executed, in order. One script failing will not stop other scripts from failing unless told to do so in the MODULE/defs/options parameters tree via the "disco/client/module/halt_on_failure" option. Otherwise, errors are reported, but all scripts will be executed regardless.

MODULE/defs/parameters

Each module can define default parameters which will be made available to all clients using the module. These parameters will be merged together on the client at module fetch time, and any node-specific parameters will override any default parameters specified here (they are rsync'ed over the top of each other). These parameters will be rooted at /MODULE_NAME/... .