Pinocchio - A git puppet.

A minimalist tool for Git based server provisioning.

Why?

Server configuration and software provisioning should be damn simple.

There are lots of tools for helping you install and configure your full software stack at your new and shiny cloud based slice. Just to name a few, we have Puppet, Chef, and the Capistrano based Sprinkle. All of them trying to solve the problem of automating software installation and configuration on many servers. Basically you write a recipe file containing instructions on how to install or configure something, some of these recipes require you to learn their respective mini/dsl language, some of them even require you to host those recipes on a service of their own. Sure these tools all have their own merit and can be useful when managing lots of servers, but for me, they were sometimes just like too much complex when I just wanted to provision a new slice to get more fun at coding a new experiment.

I just wanted to have some dead simple way of uploading a new configuration file or instructions for the server on how to install something. I wanted to deliver these just like I'm used with regular code, by using git. I wanted to push and see only the new pending instructions being executed on my remote slices. I wanted to have all of it versioned and under control. I wanted these changes to be incremental, something like using rails database migrations but for provisioning my servers.

So Pinocchio was born.

How it works

Pinocchio is just a simple git update hook. It works by determining which changes it needs to execute since the last successful update. It does it by leveraging on git to know which migrations need to be run, and only when all of these pending migrations have a successful exit status the git repo is updated.

Installation

To use Pinocchio on your remote server, all you need is for it to have git installed and the pinocchio's update hook configured at a bare repo.

# install git unless you already have it on your remote server
$ ssh ubuntu@my-new-slice 'sudo apt-get install git'

# create a remote repo for pinocchio and install the update hook
$ ssh ubuntu@my-new-slice 'git init --bare ~/pinocchio'
$ scp hooks/pinocchio ubuntu@my-new-slice:~/pinocchio/hooks/update

Usage

Clone Pinocchio into a local directory on your computer, and edit your remotes accordingly, for our previous ubuntu example it would be:

$ git remote --set-url origin ubuntu@my-new-slice:~/pinocchio

Of course you can create as many remotes as servers you want to provision.

Adjust the config file as you see fit, start writing some migrate/ scripts and git push.

Updating your remote servers

Pinocchio lets you manage incremental changes on your server as a simple git repo. So, after you've written some migration scripts at migrate/ or placed some configuration files under files/ all you need if to simply make a git push and the pinocchio's update hook will take care of performing pending actions and updating files.

If all migrations run successfully, the code is updated and next time only new migrations will be executed.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute issues, ideas, pull-requests to http://github.com/vic/pinocchio/issues

Testimonials

Just another puppet who loves using this simple tool to improve their infrastructure and development process:

License

MIT