right_env

INTRODUCTION

As RightScale systems evolve, developers are faced with having to maintain a quickly growing list of applications. Each application requires different tools for development and for deployment. Tools may include different versions of ruby, rubygems, bundler etc. Being able to setup an environment appropriately for each application is becoming increasingly complex and switching from one application to another for development in particular is quickly becoming close to impossible.

rconf aims at addressing some of these difficulties by providing a uniform and consistent mechanism for applications developed at RightScale to declaratively specify the tools they depend on various platforms (linux, darwin and potentially windows).

rconf uses a DSL close to Chef recipes for defining an application configuration. Each application must be equipped with a definition that must reside at the top level directory of the application and use the ‘.rc’ file extension. When run for the first time rconf sets up a .rvmrc file which gets invoked and sets up the environment each time the application directory gets ‘cd-ed’ into.

Internally rconf relies on ‘configurators’ to configure the machine appropriately. There is one configurator per tool that needs configuration. Each configurator is dynamically instantiated by rconf as it reads the application configuration file. This makes for an extensible system where new configurator may be added to configure new tools that new applications may rely on.

REQUIREMENTS

Running

Linux and Mac OS X

  • ruby >= 1.8.6

  • curl

  • tar

Windows

  • ruby >= 1.8.6

  • Win32API gem

Unit testing

Install the following gems for testing:

  • rspec >= 2.0

  • flexmock

Then the build can be tested with

rake spec

WRITING RCONF CONFIGURATION FILES

rconf uses a ruby DSL for configuration files (.rc). Each configurator is associated with a keyword. The configuration for a given configurator then lists each configurator setting it needs to set and the associated value as in:

ruby do
  version 'ruby-1.9.2-p136'
end

The configuration file consists of a sequence of these configurator sections executed in order. For a complete list of available configurators run:

rconf --configurators

The same configurator can appear multiple times in a configuration file.

EXTENDING RCONF WITH NEW CONFIGURATORS

Writing a configurator consists of writing a ruby class which includes the RightConf::Configurator module and uses the class methods define there to register, provide a description and list its settings.

The exact methods are:

  • register: Takes one argument which is the keyword associated with the configurator in configuration files.

  • description: Associates the description with the configurator used in the help.

  • settings: The value should be a hash where the keys are the settings names (ruby symbols) and the value is the setting description.

  • validate_has_settings: An array of settings names (symbols) for all settings that must be set for a configuration to be valid when using that configurator.

The configurator class then needs to implement the run method which gets called whenever rconf executes a configuration section using the configurator.

Alternatively the configurator class may implement run_<platform> where <platform> can take the values ‘darwin’, ‘linux’ or ‘windows’ if the implementation needs to be platform specific.

The configurator can also provide distribution specific implementations by implementing run_<platform>_<flavor> where <flavor> depends on the platform and can take the values ‘ubuntu’, ‘centos’ etc. (linux).

Finally the run method can also be implemented using the full specification for a platform including the release number (e.g. run_linux_ubuntu_10_10). In each case rconf will use the most specific implementation (so if both run_linux and run_linux_ubuntu are provided and the configurator is running on Ubuntu then rconf will call the run_linux_ubuntu implementation).