xc
XC is a parallel executer written in Go. It offers you a nice CLI with a number of handy commands to run tasks on servers in parallel, autocompletion, a simple DSL to express host lists in a laconic way and things like that.
Try start with running xc and entering the help
command. The most useful commands are exec
, runscript
, hostlist
and distribute
. Feel free to use help <command or topic>
to get more info on those.
Building
Xc is structure using go modules so the building process is as easy as typing go build -o xc cmd/xc/main.go
DSL
In xc hosts are combined into groups and may belong to a datacenter, groups may be combined into other groups, and any group may belong to a workgroup (you may think of workgroups as of projects), which reflects inventoree storage structure.
A reference note: Inventoree, previously known as conductor was originally developed as a http backend for one of early versions of xc (called executer those days).
Every host list may be written as a expression of comma-separated tokens, where every token represents a host, a group of host, or a whole workgroup of groups of hosts.
host1.example.com
is a single host.
%group1
represents a group.
*workgroup
represents a workgroup.
@some_dc
may be postfixed to a token to filter the resulting hostlist by a datacenter
#tag1
may be postfixed to a token to filter the result by a given tag
Any token may be excluded if it starts with -
symbol.
Some self-explanatory examples:
host1,host2 - simple host list containing 2 hosts
%group1 - a group of hosts taken from inventoree
%group1,host1 - all hosts from group1, plus host1
%group1,-host2 - all hosts from group1, excluding(!) host2
%group2@dc1 - all hosts from group2, located in datacenter dc1
*myworkgroup@dc2,-%group3,host5 - all hosts from wg "myworkgroup" excluding hosts from group3, plus host5
%group5#tag1 - all hosts from group5 tagged with tag1
Backends
At the moment xc supports 3 backends to load hosts/groups data from
Ini file
The most easy to start with is "ini" backend. Configuration is as simple as these three lines:
[backend]
type = ini
filename = ~/xcdata.ini
The format of the ini-file itself is simple but flexible as you can see in the following self-explanatory example
[datacenters]
dc1
dc2
[workgroups]
workgroup1
[groups]
group1 wg=workgroup1 tags=tag1,tag2
group1.1 wg=workgroup1 parent=group1 tags=tag3,tag4
[hosts]
host1.example.com group=group1 dc=dc1
host2.example.com group=group1.1 dc=dc2
All the fields given in equation format, i.e., groups/dcs/tags for hosts or worgroups/tags for groups are optional.
JSON file
More complicated way is to use JSON file as backend. Confugure backend section in you ini file like that:
[backend]
type = json
filename = ~/xcdata.json
The format of the JSON-file is more complicated that INI file:
{
"datacenters": [
{
"name": "dc1"
},
{
"name": "dc2",
"parent": "dc1"
}
],
"workgroups": [
{
"name": "wg1"
},
{
"name": "wg2",
"description": "test description"
}
],
"groups": [
{
"name": "group1",
"workgroupid": "wg1",
"tags": ["tag1", "tag2"]
},
{
"name": "group1.1",
"workgroup": "wg2",
"parent": "group1",
"tags": ["tag3", "tag4"]
}
],
"hosts": [
{
"name": "host1.example.com",
"group": "group1",
"dc": "dc1"
},
{
"name": "host2.example.com",
"group": "group1.1",
"dc": "dc2",
"tags": ["tag4"]
}
]
}
Same all the fields given in equation format, i.e., groups/dcs/tags for hosts or worgroups/tags for groups are optional.
Conductor (Legacy Inventoree)
Conductor backend uses legacy v1 API of Conductor/Inventoree 5.x-6.x. This API doesn't require authentication
and provides the whole data xc may use via single handler /api/v1/open/executer_data
. It's easy to configure as follows:
[backend]
type = conductor
# url is the base url of the conductor/inventoree instance
url = http://c.inventoree.ru
# you can optionally restrict the data to specified work groups
work_groups = workgroup1,workgroup2
Inventoree
Inventoree backend utilizes the modern inventoree API v2 which is supported since inventoree 7.0. There's no specific handler for xc though so the data loading is performed in several steps. It's still faster than conductor backend as it doesn't rely on internal inventoree recursive data fetching. The configuration is similar to conductor however it's mandatory to configure auth_token
option is inventoree doesn't have API handlers without authentication.
[backend]
type = inventoree
url = http://v7.inventoree.ru
work_groups = ...
auth_token = ...