foreman-openbolt

Bringing OpenBolt Task & Plans into Foreman!

Introduction

OpenBolt is the open source successor of Bolt by Perforce. OpenBolt supports running Tasks or Plans against various targets via different transport protocols. OpenBolt and Bolt are CLI-only tools. They connect to the targets from a central location (usually a jumpnode or workstation).

Tasks

Tasks are little executeable things, like binaries or scripts. They are enhanced with a metadata file, which describes input and output parameters. A task is copied to N targets and executed there.

Plans

Plans provide complex logic options, written in the Puppet language. Besides the usual Puppet language functions, it's also possible to execute tasks and evaluate their responses.

OpenBolt in Foreman!

OpenBolt is the Ansible counterpart and OpenBolt is OpenVox/Puppet native. OpenBolt and OpenVox/Puppet integrate very well together and OpenBolt can reuse your existing code. Since OpenBolt is a CLI only application, and most OpenVox and Puppet users run Foreman anyways, it made sense to integrate OpenBolt into Foreman, instead of writing another web UI.

Installation

The installation is split into four parts:

Foreman Plugin
Foreman Smartproxy Plugin
OpenBolt
Code Deployment

See How_to_Install_a_Plugin for how to install Foreman plugins. The theforeman/foreman puppet module also supports the Foreman plugin installation. The theforeman/foreman_proxy puppet module also supports the Foreman Smartproxy plugin installation.

The Foreman plugin provides UI elements to start Tasks on various nodes. Foreman then talks to a Smartproxy to run OpenBolt. The Smartproxy also establishes the connections to the various targets. This is usually a SSH, WinRM, or Choria connection. The Choria transport requires OpenBolt 5.5 or later and is not available in Puppet Bolt. SSH and WinRM transports work with any version.

You need to have bolt in your $PATH on the Smartproxy. OpenBolt packages are available at yum.voxpupuli.org & apt.voxpupuli.org in the openvox8 repo. You can also use the legacy Bolt packages from Perforce from the puppet-tools repo on apt.puppet.com or yum.puppet.com.

The integration is supported on Foreman 3.17 and all following versions, including development/nightly builds.

OpenBolt relies on Tasks & Plans. They are distributed as modules. The plugin assumes that you deployed your code. We recommend to use r10k or g10k to deploy code, as you do it on your compilers.

A handful of core/default Tasks & Plans are also included in the OpenBolt rpm/deb packages.

Documentation

Usage: screenshots and walkthrough of the UI
Development: linting, unit tests, acceptance tests, building packages
Releasing: version locations, release steps, RPM/DEB packaging
Choria Testing: setting up Choria on a Foreman install for transport testing

Contributing & support

Fork and send a Pull Request. Thanks! If you have questions or need professional support, please join the #sig-orchestrator channel on the Vox Pupuli slack.

Copyright

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.