61 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
61 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
This is a work in progress configuration management system using Haskell
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and Git.
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Propellor enures that the system it's run in satisfies a list of
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properties, taking action as necessary when a property is not yet met.
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The design is intentionally very minimal.
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Propellor lives in a git repository, and so to set it up it's cloned
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to a system, and "make" can be used to pull down any new changes,
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and compile and run propellor. This can be done by a cron job, or
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a local propellor on your laptop can ssh in and run it.
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Properties are defined using Haskell. Edit config.hs to get started.
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There is no special language as used in puppet, chef, ansible, etc.. just
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the full power of Haskell. Hopefully that power can be put to good use in
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making declarative properties that are powerful, nicely idempotent, and
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easy to adapt to a system's special needs.
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Also avoided is any form of node classification. Ie, which hosts are part
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of which classes and share which configuration. It might be nice to use
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reclass[1], but then again a host is configured using simply haskell code,
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and so it's easy to factor out things like classes of hosts as desired.
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## bootstrapping and private data
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To bootstrap propellor on a new host, use: propellor --spin $host
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This looks up the git repository's remote.origin.url (or remote.deploy.url
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if available) and logs into the host, clones the url (if not already
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done), and sets up and runs propellor in /usr/local/propellor
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Private data such as passwords, ssh private keys, etc should not be checked
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into a propellor git repository in the clear, unless you want to restrict
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access to the repository. Which would probably involve a separate fork
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for each host and be annoying.
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Instead, propellor --spin $host looks for a privdata/$host.gpg file and
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if found decrypts it and sends it to the host using ssh. To set a field
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in such a file, use: propellor --set $host $field
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The field name will be something like 'Password "root"'; see PrivData.hs
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for available fields.
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## using git://... securely
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It's often easiest to deploy propellor to a host by cloning a git:// or
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http:// repository rather than by cloning over ssh://. To avoid a MITM
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attack, propellor checks that the top commit in the git repository is gpg
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signed by a trusted gpg key, and refuses to deploy it otherwise.
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This is only done when privdata/keyring.gpg exists. To set it up:
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gpg --gen-key # only if you don't already have a gpg key
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propellor --add-key $MYKEYID
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The keyring.gpg can be checked into git, but to ensure that it's
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used from the beginning when bootstrapping, propellor --spin
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transfers it to the host using ssh.
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[1] http://reclass.pantsfullofunix.net/
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