Befog is a command line utility for cloud management. Or, put another way, it's a CLI wrapper for the fog gem.

Befog allows you to manage groups or clusters of servers as "banks." A bank can have one or many servers.
Features include the ability to start, stop, add to, remove, or run a command on all servers in a bank.

For example, the following command would add 3 servers to the server bank named web-prod:

befog add web-prod --count 3

Befog tries to be helpful whenever a command is invoked with no arguments. You can start with this:

befog

and go from there. For example, you can do:

befog add

And you'll get this:

befog add [] -c, --count COUNT The number of machines to provision (required) -h, --help HELP Show this message
-n, --name NAME The name of this configuration (default: default) -p, --path PATH Path to the configuration file (default: ~/.befog) -s, --spot SPOT Provision a spot instance
-t, --type TYPE The type of machines to provision
-u, --rehearse REHEARSE Dry-run, verbose logging, but don't actually run anything

In order to do anything interesting, you first need to tell Befog about your cloud accounts. You do this using the configure subcommand.

befog configure --provider aws --key <your-aws-key> --secret <your-aws-secret>

You also need to set up bank-specific configurations.

For example, the following command sets up the provider, region, image, and keypair to be used with the server bank named web-prod (you can also just say config for short):

befog config web-prod --provider aws \
  --region us-east-1 --image <your-aws-image> \
  --keypair <your-keypair> --group <your-aws-group-name> \ 
  --type <your-aws-server-type>

To see the full list of configuration options, just type:

befog config

You generally don't need to set these up very often - just when setting up a new bank, typically using a different region, provider, or image. Once a bank is configured, all servers deployed using that bank will use the bank's configuration automatically.

Once you have a configuration set up, you can easily provision new servers:

befog add web-prod --count 3

You can also de-provision them just as easily:

befog remove web-prod --count 3

Sometimes you want one set of servers for a test environment and another for production or a beta environment. You can use the --name option to specify a named configuration different environments. For example, let's start up the web-prod bank of our test environment:

befog start web-prod --name test

Each environment must be configured separately. If you don't specify a name, the name default is applied. Again, once configured, you can typically use that configuration over and over.

Another option is to simply use different configuration files. You can do this with the --path command.

Finally, you can simply edit configurations directly if you want, since they are just YAML files and are fairly easy to read. Be careful, though, since this can confuse befog if the format get mangled somehow.

You can suspend a bank:

befog stop web-prod

Or start them back up:

befog start web-prod

You can even run a command on every server in a bank:

befog run web-prod --command 'apt-get install redis'

You can get a list of all the servers associated with a bank:

befog ls web-prod

or with a specific-provider:

befog ls --provider aws

or for all servers currently deployed:

befog ls

Befog is currently still under development and only supports basic provisioning options for Amazon EC2.