Box is full of boxes

I just know I have a Debian box somewhere…

Do you have more than π boxes? Are you constantly forgetting about them?

With Box you can easily:

Keep inventory of your boxes:

  $ box ls
  me@foo.bar.com
  i@bar.baz.net
  myself@quux.org

Check if they're up:

  $ box uptime
  me@foo.bar.com | 15:29:49 up 24 days, 3:07, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
  i@bar.baz.net | 3:29PM up 17 days, 3:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.20, 0.14, 0.09
  myself@quux.org | 3:29PM up 42 days, 1:44, 15 users, load averages: 1.30, 1.94, 1.88

Remind yourself what you put in those boxes:

  $ box id
  me@foo.bar.com | Linux foo 3.5.0-17-generic i686
  i@bar.baz.net | NetBSD bar 6.0.1 amd64
  myself@quux.org | Linux quux 2.6.34-generic amd64

All this and more, for the low price of nothing! Get Box today!

Overview

Box is a remote command execution program. Box allows you to run commands on all of your servers and presents the produced results in a readable format.

Box is liberally licensed with the ISC license.

In the future, Box will likely morph into a minimal configuration management system.

Who Box is for

Box is designed for managing at most twentyish boxes. If you have a larger deployment, we recommend that you use tools like Ansible, Salt Stack, Chef or Puppet (in roughly increasing order of complexity).

Requirements

A POSIX /bin/sh implementation on boxes and on the controlling machine.
Access to boxes with an SSH key.
Box runs commands in parallel on each box if GNU Parallel is installed.

Getting started

Box doesn't have a an installation method yet. You can run it easily from a Git clone, though:

git clone git@github.com:wolverian/box.git
cd box
echo user1@host1.com >> etc/hosts
echo user2@host2.com >> etc/hosts
PATH=bin:$PATH
box tasks
…
box id
…

Troubleshooting

I can't enter my server password

Box requires that you use SSH keys for authentication.