UCMT

Unified Config Management Tool

Project Description

The main goal is to provide tool for local configuration that allows easy transition to 1:N management. So here is vision:

• frontend: web-UI, GUI, TUI, CLI, whatever, for now lets start with CLI
• backend: salt/puppet/chef/ansible/cfengine. In general write config for CM and not config files directly itself.
• features: discovery/edit/create/apply on top of backend. Each step separated, so user can e.g. apply itself by using CM directly.
• default value is keep value as it is, so anything not specific is not modified, but when something is specified then it can "eat" modifications as do salt and others
• supported distros - openSUSE, SLE, ubuntu, debian, fedora at least
• communication between frontend and backend is a CLI and YAML file with defined structure, but not aiming to be any kind of new standard, just textual configuration to transfer data in human readable form.

Advantages:

• easily extensible as it use plugins like e.g. git
• can run as service similar way like e.g. salt server can run it via ssh
• easy move from 1:1 to 1:N
• does not repeat what CM can already do and gets many features for free.
• distro agnostic, so user can use same tool in heterogenous environment
• can work remotely

Disadvantages:

• Overwrite manual changes
• less features/configuration options then specialized tools like YaST

Use Cases:

• I have one server that I am taking care. And as my project start growing I need more of them and want to have it consistently configured. So easily move from 1:1 to 1:N.
• Company already use salt and I get a task to manage also FTP server configuration over it. I want to experiment with it at first on single server with some UI that allows me to quickly create initial config and then tune it with more advanced settings.
• Company bought another one and they use salt and we are using ansible. Goal is to unify it. I want tool that helps me with conversion.
• I want to start with ansible and prefer GUI for easy start.
• We have old server and need to migrate it. I want a tool that helps me with digging what is in it.

API Proposal:

• as said above communication is done via CLI and yaml file
• discovery using some CM tool to discover and convert to YAML
• backend is just CLI that do YAML->target file(-s) for given CM
• frontend works on top of YAML + can call that CLI
• apply is just different CLI for given backend, additional features like dry run can be also supported by this CLI. machine output is must have

Live Action

Here is ucmt in action. At first it shows result of creating ucmt config with users command. Then it will generate salt configuration and apply it to create new user. At the end it remove this user and use ansible for it.

Future

Nice features for future ( order is random ):

• remote apply and discovery
• more areas to cover
• more backends
• GUI tool
• interactive CLI
• rubocop style and unit testing of code

How to Start

ucmt is now distributed as ruby gem. So simple gem install ucmt is enough to start playing with it. For salt and ansible backend respective tools are needed. For discovery ansible is needed.

Discovery

There is discovery tool that try to extract yaml file describing configuration from system. It uses ansible as it is faster then salt-call to get that info. It can also extract info without root access, but information is mroe limited.

Backends

So far there are two backends - one for ansible and one for salt. Backend can create configuration for target tool, can apply it and can also do dry-run to show what will change.