Hicks

Hicks happily spawns machines.

Hicks is a simple tool to spawn and provision machines. Currently only UpCloud is supported but in the future, other services should be added (e.g. DigitalOcean, Linode, Vagrant, or already existing hosts (e.g. physical servers rented by the month)).

Getting started

Hicks is in development and not yet released on Hackage. To install, clone this repository and run cabal install:

> git clone https://github.com/noteed/hicks.git
> cd hicks
> cabal install

Make sure you have ~/.cabal/bin in your PATH and you can run hicks --help to see the available commands.

You need an account on UpCloud. You also need to generate API credentials for your account that you paste in secret/upcloud-key.txt.

> cat secret/upcloud-key.txt
api_username/api_password

At this point you should be able to run:

> hicks account
username: noteed
credits: 4625.72

This command reports your username and available credits (in cents).

Next steps

Have a look at the test-against-upcloud.sh script. It shows the basic operations you can perform to create a machine on UpCloud, wait for it until it is up and running, and do some basic provisioning.

When you create a machine, you use

> hicks create <some-hostname>

Provisioning consists of simply uploading a file hierarchy locally stored in the provision/<some-hostname> director. In particular, it should contain a script located at root/bin/provision that will be run after upload.

Configure

When you ran cabal install above, Cabal created an executable hicks. Actually, the source of that executable is bin/config.hs. This means you can either fork this repository and configure Hicks to your liking by modifying bin/config.hs, or create a new program depending on the hicks package.

Notes

UpCloud doesn't allow to set a public SSH key automatically when a machine is created. Instead Hicks will store the root password return by UpCloud in ~/.hicks until the hicks authorize command is run. That command will upload a public SSH key you choose. Further disabling the root password should be done in the provisioning script.

Limitations

Only UpCloud is supported.
Some configuration values are hard-coded (e.g. uk-lon1 or Ubuntu 12.04).