Minionizer

Minionizer aims to be a light weight, yet powerful, server provisioning tool with minimum learning curve.

Minionizer is still in beta development and is not yet ready for anything resembling production use.

Overview

Minionizer allows you keep all of your provisioning "recipies" for a set of servers, along with any data those recipies may need (such as config files), in a single git repository.

Minionizer uses ssh to connect to machines and run commands. There are no "agents" or other software to install on servers before minionizer can take over.

Managed machines (minions) are assigned roles (web, db, production, staging, etc) and can be (re)provisioned all at once by any role, or individually by server address.

Sensitive data, such as passwords, WILL BE gpg encrypted and only the encrypted copies will be checked into the repository. If you change any of these files, Minionizer will detect the change and prompt you to re-encrypt them and commit the newly encrypted versions.

A core set of commands WILL BE provided, such as uploading files to the server, installing apt packages, etc. You can use these core commands to build more complex recipies, or use any of many minionizer plugins that WILL BE available, such as posgresql installationi/upgrade, ruby installation/upgrade, etc.

Installation

gem install minionizer

Demonstration

A demonstration repo is available at https://github.com/jsgarvin/minionizer-demo.

Usage

Setup a new provisioning project in the current folder.

minionize --init subfolder_name

Creates subfolder_name and initializes it with some initial folders and files to get you started.

Modify config/minions.yml

The minions.yml file is where you define what servers this project will manage and what roles each server will play.

You will probably want assign each server multiple roles, such as ['production', 'db'].

Create role instructions

A sample role file WILL BE provided in the ./roles folder to get you started. Each role file defines what servers assigned that role should do on each (re)provisioning.

It is not necessary to create a role file for every role that you added to your config/minions.yml file. You will likely have some roles, such as "production", that are mearly a means of grouping several servers together and won't have a corresponding role file. You will need at least one role, though, such as "db" or "webserver", that will have a corresponding role file.

Provision Servers

To provision all of the servers that are assigned a particular role, run...

minionize role_name

This will loop through each server that is assigned role_name and run each role file for each role that that server is assigned. For instance, if a server is assigned the roles 'production' and 'db', and you run minionize production, then when minionizer reaches this machine, it will run the 'db' role file (assuming it exists in the ./roles folder).

or

minionize my.server.address.com

This will loop through each role that is assigned to just that server, and any corresponding role files will be run.

Contribute

To contribute to Minionizer development you will need to install vagrant and VirtualBox in order to be able to run acceptance tests.

Once installed from within your own clone of the Minionizer repo, run rake test:vm:start to initialize the acceptance test virtual machine. The first time you do this it may take a long time to download install the initial box.

To shut down the vm, run rake test:vm:stop.