Caco

Configure your machines like you develop your web apps

To start using Caco, you need a control repo, that is where you add your node config files, keys, certs, whatever makes sense to you.

Create a new Gemfile with bundle init and add to it:

gem 'caco'

After you can add your config files under nodes folder, with each file being the hostname of your machines:

nodes/
  web.example.com.rb
  db.example.com.rb

This is the minimum you need to start using Caco, a hello world example would be, in nodes/<hostname>.rb add

Caco.file "/root/hello.txt",
  content: "Hello World From Caco :)"

Sync your control repo to your remote machine and run ./bin/caco inside its folder, it will create the /root/hello.txt file with Hello World From Caco :) content

It's useful to share data between your nodes, you can do this on the data folder, you can add yaml files and access inside your config files.

It also has a hierarchy, most specific values overwrite more generic value, files from common to specific are:

• data/common.yaml
• data/<os_name>.yaml
• data/<os_name>/<distro_name>.yaml
• data/nodes/.yaml

You can also encrypt values with your keys, for the first time you can create them with eyaml createkeys command, you add the files:

• keys/private_key.pkcs7.pem
• keys/public_key.pkcs7.pem

After that you can edit your yaml files with the command eyaml edit path/to/file.yaml

It's safe to commit your encrypted yaml files, but remember to never commit your keys, the keys folder is also on gitignore.

On your server you also need to sync the keys folder to be able to read the values when configuring the nodes.

To read the values, as they are organized as yaml files, considering the structure:

# common.yaml
---
prefix:
  name: Common

# nodes/hostname.yaml
---
prefix:
  name: Hostname

(as node file is more specific it overwrites the common.yaml value)

Caco::Facter.("prefix", "name")
# => 'Hostname'

Caco configuration can be set using environment variables, all variables should have the prefix CACO_, eg. to change the LOG_FILE value, use CACO_LOG_FILE=/path/to/caco.log

See a better description to each config option after the list

• INTERACTIVE_WRITES : Ask what action should take when changing an existing file
• LOG_FILE : Path to log file

This is useful to understand how Caco is executing, on the images we have an example when file is being changed. The second one if after is confirmed to change the file

By default we log to /var/log/caco.log, but sometimes you maybe want to log to a different location, so here is the place to point to your destination

• Bootstrap control repo via CLI
• Sync remote control repo
• Run automatically from developer machine
• Add operations to run as a health check after the config process to ensure it's working as expected (that can also be used as acceptance test in development environment)

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Caco project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.