conman - Server Configuration Management

This is still under active development and is subject to change

Conman is a simple server configuration management library. The core concepts are around:

• Ingredients - reusable, sharable components that achieve specific tasks
• Recipes - your public or private recipes that make use of the Ingredients

Ingredients should ensure that they are idempotent. Public Recipes may include setting up a LAMP system for example.

Installation

gem install conman

Ingredient Repository

Our ingredient library can be found at: github.com/moocode/ingredients

Creating your first Ingredient

An ingredient is a simple Ruby Class whose name ends with Ingredient and (optionally) subclasses Ingredient. The Ingredient superclass just provides some helper methods if you wish to use them. Because they are just Ruby classes they can be tested using any test framework you like. See our ingredients repository for some examples.

class FileIngredient < Ingredient
  def create(options={})
	`touch #{options[:path]}` unless exists? :path => options[:path]
  end

  def exists?(options={})
    File.exists? options[:path]
  end
end

Your first Recipe

class MyRecipe < Recipe
	file :create, :path => '/tmp/foo.txt'
end

Running your Recipe

conman ships with a binary for running your recipes. It takes a path to a folder of ingredients and a recipe file:

conman -i /path/to/ingredients /path/to/recipes/my_recipe.rb

Alternatively you can run them from a script (handy for testing)

Conman.init :ingredients => '/path/to/ingredients/'
Conman.run '/path/to/recipes/my_recipe.rb'

Testing

Here's an example of a TestUnit test for an ingredient:

require 'test/unit'
require 'rubygems'
require 'mocha'
require 'conman'

class FileIngredientTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def setup
    @@conman ||= Conman.init(:ingredients => '/path/to/ingredients/file.rb')
    @file = FileIngredient.new
  end

  def test_create
    FileIngredient.any_instance.expects(:create).returns('touch /tmp/moo.txt')
    @file.create :path => '/tmp/moo.txt'
  end
end

Preparing a live server

First you need to install all the pre-requisites (ruby, rubygems, conman, git-core)

apt-get install ruby git-core -y
ruby -v

cd /tmp
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/70696/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
tar zxf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.7
sudo ruby setup.rb --no-ri --no-rdoc
cd /tmp
rm -rf rubygems-1.3.7
ln -sf /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
gem -v

gem install conman