Samstag, 25. Juni 2011

Managing Servers with (R)?ex

Rex is a tool to automate the management of servers. In this blog post i will just post an example of managing some webservers with mod_jk and tomcat.

Every webserver has the same file system structure and the same os (but this is negligible).


To prepare a new webserver i've written a task to install all the needed packages, copy the configuration files and start all the required services.


This is my Rexfile.
use lib 'lib';
user "root";      # set your username
password "pass";  # set your password
pass_auth;        # enable password authentication

# put your server in this group
group "www" => "www[01..05]";

# now load every module via ,,require''
require Rex::mysite;
I've splittet the different tasks in some smaller modules.

This is the module for all the base tasks. (Saved under "lib/Rex/mysite.pm")

package Rex::mysite;

use Rex::Commands;
use Rex::Commands::Fs;
use Rex::Commands::Run;
use Rex::Commands::Pkg;
use Rex::Commands::Upload;
use Rex::Hardware;

use Data::Dumper;

use Rex::mysite::plain;

desc "Prepare system";
task "prepare", group => 'www', sub {

   my %host_info = Rex::Hardware->get(qw/ Host /);

   if($host_info{'Host'}->{'operatingsystemrelease'} =~ m/^5/) {
      install file => "/etc/apt/sources.list", {
         source => "files/sources.list.lenny",
      };
   }
   else {
      install file => "/etc/apt/sources.list", {
         source => "files/sources.list.squeeze",
      };
   }

   if(! is_dir("/root/.ssh")) {
      mkdir "/root/.ssh";
   }

   upload "files/authorized_keys", "/root/.ssh/authorized_keys";

   run "apt-get update";

   install package => "vim";
   install package => "less";

   remove package => "avahi-daemon";
};


1;
And now i have a task to install the tomcat server and configure the apache servers with mod_jk.  (Saved under "lib/Rex/mysite/plain.pm"). With the needs function i define a dependency to the prepare Task in the module Rex::mysite. So this task will be executed always in the same context (same ssh connection) of the tomcat Task in this module.
package Rex::mysite::plain;

use Rex::Commands;
use Rex::Commands::Fs;
use Rex::Commands::Run;
use Rex::Commands::Pkg;
use Rex::Commands::Upload;
use Rex::Commands::Service;

use Data::Dumper;

desc "Prepare Tomcat";
task "tomcat", sub {
   needs Rex::mysite "prepare";

   run "echo sun-java6-jdk shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 select true | /usr/bin/debconf-set-selections";
   run "echo sun-java6-jre shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 select true | /usr/bin/debconf-set-selections";

   install package => [
                        "sun-java6-jdk",
                        "libapache2-mod-jk",
                        "sc-tomcat-6.0.28",
                        "sc-tomcat-juli-6.0.28",
                        "sc-tomcat-log4j-1.2.16"
                     ];

   unlink "/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default";
   upload "files/000-default", "/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default";
   upload "files/jk.conf", "/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/jk.conf";

   install file => "/etc/apache2/workers.properties", {
      source    => "files/workers.properties.tpl",
      on_change => service(apache2 => "restart"),
   };

};

1;
The files i uploaded in these tasks are not realy interesting. They are just simple configuration files. Except the file workers.properties.tpl. This i a template file and looks like this.
worker.list=lb,jkstatus

worker.w1.port=8009
worker.w1.host=<%+ $::Network->{"networkconfiguration"}->{"eth0"}->{"ip"} %>
worker.w1.type=ajp13
worker.w1.lbfactor=1
worker.w1.reference=worker.template

worker.lb.type=lb
worker.lb.balance_workers=w1
worker.lb.max_reply_timeouts=10

worker.lb.sticky_session=false
worker.jkstatus.type=status

worker.template.type=ajp13
worker.template.connection_pool_timeout=600
worker.template.connection_pool_minsize=0
This is a template file. During the upload process Rex will parse this template and replace <%+ $::Network->{"networkconfiguration"}->{"eth0"}->{"ip"} %> with the ip of the networkdevice eth0.

With these tasks i can update the configuration of all my servers realy simple. If a new server needs to be installed i can just run the task on this server.

$ rex -H mynewserver mysite:plain:tomcat

3 Kommentare:

  1. Hi Jan!

    Have you tried Puppet too? Any advantages / disadvantages?

    AntwortenLöschen
  2. Hi Paul,

    yes i use puppet in some projects, too. Rex is a tool that originaly was developed for software deployments (for rails, tomcat and php). But i added more functions to it and now you can do many things with rex, too (like configuration management and so on). With the advantage that you don't need an extra agent on all your servers, just ssh.

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