tacoscript

Overview

Tacoscript library provides functionality for provisioning of remote servers and local machines running on any OS. Tacoscript can be installed as a binary therefore it doesn't require any additional tools or programs on the host system.

Tacoscript provisions host systems from simple yaml files written in a SaltStack driven configuration language.

Why we need another provisioning tool? Unfortunately the next competitors like Puppet, Ansible or Salt have a limited support for Windows or require installation of additional tools which is not always convenient.

Tacoscript is written in GO, so its provided as an executable binary for a big variety of host OS and platforms and it requires no additional tools to be installed in the host system. You can find the list of supported OS and architectures here.

Installation

As a compiled binary

Jump to our release page and download a binary for your host OS. Don't forget to download a corresponding md5 file as well.

    # On MacOS
    wget https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript/releases/download/latest/tacoscript-latest-darwin-amd64.tar.gz
    
    # On linux
    wget https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript/releases/download/latest/tacoscript-latest-linux-amd64.tar.gz
    
    # On Windows
    Just download https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript/releases/download/latest/tacoscript-latest-windows-amd64.zip
    Also download https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript/releases/download/latest/tacoscript-latest-windows-amd64.zip.md5

Verify the checksum:

    #On MacOS
    curl -Ls https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript/releases/download/latest/tacoscript-latest-darwin-amd64.tar.gz.md5 | sed 's:$: tacoscript-latest-darwin-amd64.tar.gz:' | md5sum -c
    
    #On linux
     curl -Ls https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript/releases/download/latest/tacoscript-latest-linux-386.tar.gz.md5 | sed 's:$: tacoscript-latest-linux-amd64.tar.gz:' | md5sum -c
     
    #On Windows assuming you're in the directory with the donwloaded file
     CertUtil -hashfile tacoscript-latest-linux-amd64.tar.gz MD5
    
    #The output will be :
     MD5 hash of tacoscript-0.0.4pre-windows-amd64.zip:
     7103fcda170a54fa39cf92fe816833d1
     CertUtil: -hashfile command completed successfully.
    
    #Compare the command output to the contents of file tacoscript-latest-windows-amd64.zip.md5 they should match

Note: if the checksums didn't match please don't continue the installation!

Unpack and install the tacoscript binary on your host machine

    #On linux/MacOS
    tar -xzvf tacoscript-0.0.4pre-darwin-amd64.tar.gz 
    mv tacoscript /usr/local/bin/tacoscript
    chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tacoscript

For Windows

Extract file contents:

Create a Tacoscript folder in C:\Program Files

Copy the tacoscript.exe binary to C:\Program Files\Tacoscript

Double click on the tacoscript.exe and allow it's execution:

Install as a go binary:

go get github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/tacoscript

Program execution

1. Prepare a configuration script in the yaml format (see the Configuration section below), e.g. tascoscript.yaml

On Linux/MacOS

The tacoscript binary expects a configuration file to be provided in the input, to execute script do:

/usr/local/bin/tacoscript tascoscript.yaml

You can also output the execution details with -v flag:

/usr/local/bin/tacoscript -v tascoscript.yaml

On Windows

1. Place the tacoscript.yaml file in C:\Program Files\Tacoscript\

2. Right-click on tacoscript.exe and create a shortcut with following properties:

   Target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k tacoscript.exe -v tascoscript.yaml

   Start In: C:\Program Files\Tacoscript\

1. Click on the shortcut to execute the tacoscript.exe

Configuration

The configuration file has yaml format. The file consists of a list of scripts which define a single desired state of the host system. A desired state can be an installed program or a file or a running service.

Here is the minimal possible tacoscript.yaml:

# unique id of the script, can be any string
create-file:
  #task type which should be executed
  cmd.run:
    - name: touch /tmp/somefile.txt

We can read the script as:

We have a script with the name `create-file`. It has 1 task of type `cmd.run` which executes `touch /tmp/somefile.txt` command. The desired result of this script execution would be an empty file at `/tmp/somefile.txt`.

Scripts

The tacoscript.yaml file contains a collection of scripts. Each script defines a desired state of the host system. You can add as many scripts as you want. The tacoscript binary will execute scripts from file sequentially. If any script failures, the program will stop the execution.

Tasks

Each script contains a collection of tasks. Each task has a unique type id which identifies the kind of operation the task can do. Each task gets parameters list specified under it as input data. In the example above the task cmd.run receives parameter -name with value /tmp/somefile.txt and interprets it as a command which should be executed.

Task types

• cmd.run
• file.managed
• pkg.installed
• pkg.uptodate
• pkg.removed

Templates

See Templates rendering

Known limitations

• to use shell pipes, redirects or glob expands, please specify a shell parameter
• user parameter will require sudo rights for tacoscript, in Windows this parameter is ignored
• if you use cmd.run tasks in Windows, you'd better specify the shell parameter as cmd.exe, otherwise you will get errors like: exec: "xxx": executable file not found in %PATH%
• the order of the scripts is not guaranteed. If you don't use the require values, the scripts will be executed in any order.

Development instructions

You can run unit-tests as:

make test

Execute static code analytic tools

1. Install golangci-lint using instructions from this site

2. Run the tool

   make sca

Compile tacoscript binary for your host OS

make build

Compile tacoscript binary for Windows

make build-win