Provisional

Provisional is a tool to manage and provision server images. It is designed to make building immutable servers easier, by automating the process of image creation.

Images are created based on other images (such as an AWS AMI). You define scripts that are run to install and configure any required software.

You can then provision your images to deploy your application.

Provisional currently works only with Digital Ocean, but can easily be extended to work with other providers.

You'll need Ruby (2.0 or later) installed on your local system.

Install Provisional with Rubygems:

gem install provisional

Provisional is meant to be used from within your application development directory.

provisional init                    # Create config/infrastructure/provisional.yml
provisional image list              # List images (including all versions)
provisional image create image-name # Create an image
provisional image update image-name # Update an image (or all images)
provisional deploy                  # Deploy all images, per config file

Docker is overly complex for simple application architectures. There are a lot of coordination pieces (Fleet, Kubernetes, etc.) required. We can also store our images with the provider instead of in our own Docker infrastructure. That said, nothing prevents you from running Docker on top of the VM images you create with Provisional. You might also be able to adapt Provisional to create Docker images.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release to create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to RubyGems.

To run the tests, you'll need a Digital Ocean account, with an API key generated. You'll have to export the key in an environment variable named DIGITAL_OCEAN_API_KEY. You can also enable extra debugging by exporting GLI_DEBUG=true.

1. Fork the project repo.
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature).
3. Make sure tests pass (cucumber and rspec).
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature').
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature).
6. Create a new pull request.

Note that this is currently a work in progress. Much remains to be done.

• Refactor to put an OOP layer above the DropletKit layer.
• Move Digital Ocean support to an adapter.
  • Add an adapter for AWS.