Foreman Maintain
The foreman_maintain
aims to provide various features that helps keep the
Foreman/Satellite up and running. It supports multiple versions and subparts
of the Foreman infrastructure, including server or smart proxy and is smart
enough to provide the right tools for the specific version.
Usage
Subcommands:
health Health related commands
list List the checks based on criteria
list-tags List the tags to use for filtering checks
check Run the health checks against the system
--label label Run only a specific check with a label
--tags tags Run only those with all specific set of tags
upgrade Upgrade related commands
check --target-version TARGET_VERSION Run pre-upgrade checks for upgrading to specified version
--disable-self-upgrade Disable automatic self upgrade (default: false)
run --target-version TARGET_VERSION Run the full upgrade
--disable-self-upgrade Disable automatic self upgrade (default: false)
advanced Advanced tools for server maintenance
procedure Run maintain procedures manually
run Run maintain procedures manually
by-tag Run maintain procedures in bulks
service Control applicable services
start Start applicable services
stop Stop applicable services
restart Restart applicable services
status Get statuses of applicable services
list List applicable services
enable Enable applicable services
disable Disable applicable services
backup Backup server
online Keep services online during backup
offline Shut down services to preserve consistent backup
restore Restore a backup
maintenance-mode Control maintenance-mode for application
start Start maintenance-mode
stop Stop maintenance-mode
status Get maintenance-mode status
is-enabled Get maintenance-mode status code
Upgrades
Foreman-maintain implements upgrade tooling that helps the administrator to go through the upgrade process.
The foreman-maintain tool is intended to self upgrade itself to the next major version of the project. This is needed before upgrading, run:
foreman-maintain self-upgrade
To perform just the pre-upgrade checks for the system, run:
foreman-maintain upgrade check --target-version TARGET_VERSION
The upgrade tooling is able to handle the full end-to-end upgrade via:
foreman-maintain upgrade run --target-version TARGET_VERSION
The upgrade is split into several phases with different level of impact the run of the system:
pre-upgrade check - this phase performs the checks to ensure that the system is in ready state before the upgrade. The system should still be operational at the current version, while this phase runs.
pre-migrations - these steps perform changes on the system before the actual upgrade starts. An example is disabling access to the system from external sources, a.k.a. maintenance mode or disabling Katello sync plans during the run.
After this phase ends, the system is still running the old version, and it's possible to revert the changes by running the post-migrations steps.
migrations - this phase performs the actual migrations, starting with configuring new repositories, updating the packages and running the installer.
At the end of this phase, the system should be fully migrated to the new version. However, the system is not fully operational yet, as the post-migrations steps need to revert the pre-migrations steps.
post-migrations - these steps revert the changes made in pre-migrations phase, turning the system into fully-operational again.
post-upgrade checks - these steps should perform sanity check of the system to ensure the system is valid and ready to be used again.
The state of the upgrade is kept between runs, allowing to re-run the upgrade run
in case of failure. The tool should start at the appropriate point. For example,
in case the upgrade is already in migrations phase, there is no point in running
the pre-upgrade check phase. In case the upgrade failed before migrations
phase made some modifying changes, the tool tries to rollback to the previous
state of the system.
Self-upgrade for rubygem-foreman_maintain package
When a user runs any foreman-maintain upgrade
sub commands (e.g. foreman-maintain upgrade check
or foreman-maintain upgrade run
) then,
If update available for
rubygem-foreman_maintain
package, the sub command tries to update this package. After successful package update, it returns the exit code 75 and requests user to re-run with the updated source code.Here, exit code (value 75) is to indicate that it can not continue with further execution & needs re-run. e.g.,
# foreman-maintain upgrade check --target-version TARGET_VERSION Checking for new version of foreman-maintain... rubygem-foreman_maintain.noarch repository Updating foreman-maintain package. The foreman-maintain package successfully updated. Re-run foreman-maintain with required options! # echo $? 75
If update is not available for
rubygem-foreman_maintain
package, then sub command simply executes the further steps without halt.If user wants to skip self-update mechanism then
--disable-self-upgrade
flag can be used with upgrade sub commands. e.g.,
# foreman-maintain upgrade check --target-version TARGET_VERSION --disable-self-upgrade
# foreman-maintain upgrade run --target-version TARGET_VERSION --disable-self-upgrade
Satellite notes
To use custom organization/activation key for configuring repositories during upgrade, set the following environment variables
export EXTERNAL_SAT_ORG='Sat6-CI'
export EXTERNAL_SAT_ACTIVATION_KEY='Satellite QA RHEL7'
Implementation
The foreman_maintain
maps the CLI commands into definitions. This allows to keep the set
of the commands the user needs to know immutable from version-specific changes. The mapping
between the CLI commands and definitions is made by defining various metadata.
Definitions
There are various kinds of definitions possible:
- Features - aspects that can be present on the system. It can be service (foreman, foreman-proxy), a feature (some Foreman plugin), a link to external systems (e.g. registered foreman proxy, compute resource) or another aspect that can be subject of health checks and maintenance procedures.
- Checks - definitions of health checks to indicate health of the system against the present features
- Procedures - steps for performing specific operations on the system
- Scenarios - combinations of checks and procedures to achieve some goal
The definitions for this components are present in definitions
folder.
Features
Before foreman_maintain
starts, it takes the set of features
definition
and determines their presence by running their confine
blocks against
the system.
The confine
block can run an external command to check if the feature
is there, or it can check present of other features.
A feature can define additional methods that can be used across other definitions.
class Features::Foreman < ForemanMaintain::Feature
do
label :foreman
confine do
check_min_version('foreman', '1.7')
end
end
# helper method that can be used in other definitions like this:
#
# feature(:foreman).running?
def running?
execute?('systemctl foreman status')
end
end
The features can inherit from each other, which allows overriding methods for older versions, when newer version of the feature is present in the system. This way, we shield the other definitions (checks, procedures, scenarios) from version-specific nuances.
Checks
Checks define assertions to determine status of the system.
class Checks::ForemanIsRunning < ForemanMaintain::Check
metadata do
for_feature :foreman
description 'check foreman service is running'
tags :default
end
def run
# we are using methods of a feature.
# we can define additional steps to be executed as a follow-up
# of assertion failure
assert(feature(:foreman).running?
'There are currently paused tasks in the system'),
:next_steps => Procedures::ForemanStart.new)
end
end
Similarly as features, also checks (and in fact all definitions) can used
label
, description
confine
and tags
keyword to describe themselves.
Every definition has a label
(if not stated explicitly, it's
determined from the class name).
In case some operation take more time, it's possible to enable a spinner
and update the spinner continuously with with_spinner
method.
def run
with_spinner do |spinner|
spinner.update 'checking foreman is running'
if feature(:foreman).running?
spinner.update 'foreman is not started, starting'
feature(:foreman).start
else
spinner.update 'foreman is started, restarting'
end
end
end
Procedures
Procedure defines some operation that can be performed against the system. It can be part of a scenario or be linked from a check as a remediation step.
class Procedures::ForemanStart < ForemanMaintain::Procedure
do
for_feature :foreman
description 'start foreman service'
end
def run
feature(:foreman).start
end
end
Preparation steps
Some steps can require some additional steps to be performed before we can proceed. A typical example is installing additional dependencies. A preparation step is usually a procedure.
class Procedures::InstallPackage < ForemanMaintain::Procedure
do
# definitions of parameters of the procedure
param :packages, 'List of packages to install', :array => true
end
def run
packages_action(:install, @packages)
end
# if false, the step will be considered as done: it will not be executed
def necessary?
@packages.any? { |package| package_version(package).nil? }
end
def description
"Install package(s) #{@packages.join(', ')}"
end
end
class Checks::DiskIO < ForemanMaintain::Check
do
description 'check foreman service is running'
preparation_steps { Procedures::InstallPackage.new(:packages => %w[fio]) }
end
def run
execute!('fio ...')
end
end
When running a scenario, all the preparation steps in that scenario
will be collected, and run if necessary (the necessary?
method
returning true
). The preparation steps will be run as separate scenario.
Scenarios
Scenarios represent a composition of various steps (checks and procedures) to achieve some complex maintenance operation in the system (such as upgrade).
class Scenarios::PreUpgradeCheckForeman_1_14 < ForemanMaintain::Scenario
do
description 'checks before upgrading to Foreman 1.14'
confine do
feature(:upstream)
end
:pre_upgrade_check
end
# Method to be called when composing the steps of the scenario
def compose
# we can search for the checks by metadata
steps.concat(find_checks(:default))
end
end
Hammer
In some cases, it's useful to be able to use the hammer as part of check/fix procedures. It is as simple as:
def run
feature(:hammer).run('task resume')
end
Before executing the command the feature checks if it has valid hammer configuration to run the command. Foreman maintain always use the 'admin' account to run the commands. The password is taken from the hammer config or installer answer files or asked from the user interactively (in this order). The valid credentials are stored and reused next time if still valid.
Usually we want to do the user interaction at the beginning of our scenario.
The easiest way to achieve this is to include ForemanMaintain::Concerns::Hammer
module:
include ForemanMaintain::Concerns::Hammer
which adds Procedures::HammerSetup
as a preparation step to your metadata. We are adding this
to all procedures and checks automatically.
Metadata
A set of data that describes and gives information about any definition.
You can describe a definition using following methods available in metadata:
- label - specify an unique name per definition
- tags - comma separated labels attached for the purpose of creating groups of definitions
- description - specify short description about definition
- param - declare parameters for a definition using this method
- for_feature - specify feature name for a definition. It implicitly confines the presence of that feature.
- preparation_steps - takes block using which you can perform additional steps before executing actual definition
- confine - takes block as argument to restrict execution of it
- advanced_run - takes a boolean value for procedure definition & will restrict
execution of procedure from
advanced procedure run
sub-command - before, after - methods used to define order for particular check. Specify label of other check.
Implementation components
In order to process the definitions, there are other components present in the lib
directory.
- Detector - searches the checks/procedures/scenarios based on metadata & available features
- Runner - executes the scenario
- Reporter - reports the results of the run. It's possible to define multiple reporters, based on the current use case (CLI, reporting to monitoring tool)
- Cli - Clamp-based command line infrastructure, mapping the definitions to user commands.
Testing
Since a single version of foreman_maintain
is meant to be used against multiple versions and
components combinations, the testing is a crucial part of the process.
There are multiple kind of tests foreman_maintain
:
- unit tests for implementation components - can be found in
test/lib
- this tests are independent of the real-world definitions and are focused on the internal implementation (metadata definitions, features detection)
- unit tests for definitions - can be found in
test/definitions
- this tests are focusing on testing of the code in definitions directory. There is an infrastructure to simulate various combinations of features without needing for actually having them present for development
- bats test - TBD
- to achieve stability, we also want to include bats tests as part of the infrastructure, perhaps in combination with ansible playbooks to make the testing against real-world instances as easy as possible.
Execute rake
to run the tests.
Bash completion
The completion offers suggestion of possible command-line subcommands and their options as usual. It can also suggest values for options and params where file or directory path is expected.
Bash completion is automatically installed by RPM. To use it for development setup
cp ./config/foreman-maintain.completion /etc/bash_completion.d/foreman-maintain
and load it to the current shell source /etc/bash_completion.d/foreman-maintain
.
Make sure the $PWD/bin
is in PATH
or there is full path to foreman-maintain-complete
executable specified in /etc/bash_completion.d/foreman-maintain
.
Bash completion for foreman-maintain needs pre-built cache that holds description of
all subcommands and its parameters. The cache is located by default in
~/.cache/foreman_maintain_completion.yml
. The location can be changed in foreman-maintain's
config file. The cache can be built manually with
foreman-maintain advanced prebuild-bash-completion
or is built automatically when
completion is used and the cache is missing (this may cause slight delay). The cache expires
after installer scenario answer file changed (it indicates that the features on the instance
may have changed which has impact on foreman-maintain CLI options and subcommands).
Available value types
Completion of values is dependent on CLI option and parameter settings, e.g.:
parameter 'BACKUP_DIR', 'Path to backup dir', :completion => { :type => :directory }
Possible options for the :completion
attribute are:
{ :type => :flag }
option has no value, default for flags{ :type => :value }
option has value of unknown type, no suggestions for the value, default{ :type => :directory }
value is directory, suggestions follow directory structure{ :type => :file, :filter => '\.txt$' }
value is file, suggestions follow directory structure, optional:filter
is regexp to filter the results.
Difference between maintenance-mode status and is-enabled:
maintenance-mode status
gives a brief output with On/Off message. This includes status of each step.maintenance-mode is-enabled
returns0 or 1
output depending upon the maintenance-mode status. Here, 0=ON & 1=OFF.
If users would like to check whether maintenance-mode is ON/OFF on system in their external script then
they can use subcommand foreman-maintain maintenance-mode is-enabled
.
Exit codes with special meanings -
Every command returns an exit code. Any other exit status than 0 indicates a failure of some kind. Foreman Maintain uses following exit codes with special meaning.
Exit Code | Description |
---|---|
75 | Temporary failure and needs re-run |
78 | Command executed with warning(s) |
How to contribute?
Generally, follow the Foreman guidelines. For code-related contributions, fork this project and send a pull request with all changes. Some things to keep in mind:
- Follow the rules about commit message style and create a Redmine issue. Doing this right will help reviewers to get your contribution merged faster.
- We have a development handbook to help developers understand how Foreman developers code.
- All of our pull requests run the full test suite in our Travis CI system. Please include tests in your pull requests for any additions or changes in functionality
License
This project is licensed under the GPLv3+