system-deploy

A systemd inspired system configuration and deployment tool

system-deploy is my personal server management and deployment tool. It's inspired by systemd's unit files and the deployment tool/script used @safing. It currently supports copying files/directories, installing packages and installing/enabling systemd unit files. system-deploy is meant to be executed periodically and supports running different actions and tasks when changes are detected.

The compiled binary itself includes help and documentation for almost all supported operations and even some examples.

Installation

system-deploy is written in and thus requires a working go installation to be compiled from source.

go install github.com/ppacher/system-deploy/cmd/deploy

This will install the deploy command into your $GOBIN or $GOPATH/bin if the former is not set.

Getting Started

system-deploy is modeled around .task files that follow systemd's unit file syntax. Those tasks can perform one or even multiple actions on the system and may trigger subsequent actions or tasks. Here is an example of a task file that copies a crontab file and reloads the cron daemon if it has changed (i.e. a new version has been deployed):

[Task]
Description= Install cronfile and restart cronie
StartMasked = no

[Copy]
Source= ./crontab-backup
Destination= /etc/cron.d/
FileMode= 0600

[OnChange]
Run=systemctl restart cron

As you can see, the task file starts with a Task section that contains a human readable description and may contain additional metadata for the task. The discription above is mainly for logging purposes. StartMasked= no tells system-deploy that this task is not masked from execution (masked = disabled) and will be executed. This is the default and only here for documentation purposes. If set to yes (StartMasked=yes) then the task would be disabled and not executed if not enabled by another task (for example, by using [OnChange] Unmask=<name>.task).

Following the Task section, one or more actions can be declared, each in it's own section. The example above defines the Copy action which ensures ./crontab-backup is copied and kept update in /etc/cron.d with 0600 set as the file permissions.

The next section is OnChange which can perform different actions depending on the outcome of all other sections of the task. This is another interesting concept in system-deploy. Each action section, after being executed, can set a changed flag on the task meaning that it actually performed some action. The Copy action for example performs a hash (Murmur3) comparsion of the target path to determine if it's already up-to-date or needs to be overwritten/created.

system-deploy currently contains a few built-in actions (see below) and is designed to be extended easily.

Built-in Actions

system-deploy currently supports the following actions:

• exec allows you to execute arbitrary commands
• copy allows you to copy file and directories
• onchange supports running and modifying tasks if the current task changed something
• installpackages allows you to install packages.
• platform allows you to enable/disable tasks based on the platform (package manager, os-release, ...)
• systemd allows you to install and enable systemd unit files.
• editfile allows you to manipulate files using SED like syntax.

Documentation

Additional documentation on system-deploy can be found in the docs or at https://system-deploy.ppacher.at.

Contributing

Any contributions to the system-deploy project are welcome! Just fork the repository and create a PR with your changes. It's recommended to discuss planned changes in an issue first.

License

system-deploy itself is licensed under a BSD 3-clause license. See LICENSE for more information.

Note that the bineries distributed via the release page are licensed under GPL-3 because the EditFile action is compiled against a GPL-3 licensed library.