Alternatives and related projects¶
This document presents other projects that provide similar or complementary functionalities. It focuses on differences with xal.
Interfaces¶
Deployment utilities¶
- Puppet
- Chef
- salt
- zc.buildout
- fabric
- fabtools
- collective.hostout
Fabric¶
Fabric is great for performing simple tasks. When you want to perform complex tasks, or when you want to reuse your tasks in several situations, you come to reinvent provisioning tools. You’d better use fabric to run buildout recipes (and write buildout recipes instead of fabric scripts), or use salt, or use monitoring...
Fabtools¶
Fabtools is a provisioning library for Fabric. One strength is its simplicity. But it’s also a drawback: it’s limited to Fabric (which itself is limited), there are not so many “recipes”.
Salt¶
Salt is about remote execution, and via remote execution it can perform provisioning.
Salt looks great, but as Chef of Puppet, it’s a complete software environment: it uses zeromq, requires a server (master) and clients (minions). I mean, for simple needs, it’s overkill.
As a developer, I like my development environment to keep as simple as possible. And I like to isolate my projects from my personal system. I mean I’d better install and run salt server on a VM than on my personal computer. But in the same time, I can’t reproduce a complete production environment, i.e. run one VM for salt master, one for the database server, one for the web front-end, one for the shared filesystem... Cloud-computing is not the definitive solution for me, because I often work offline (and I like it).
So... I’d like to have an alternative to Salt for simple architectures... Fabric looks like one. But I currently can’t write scripts for both!
I’d like Salt modules (those who execute commands) to be packaged as third-party libraries.
I’d like Salt to have a tiny Python client I could install on my personal computer and use it as a remote-control for the master (kind of Chef’s knife, but lighter).
zc.buildout and recipes¶
Recipes for zc.buildout allow you to configure script execution. A recipe have install(), update() and uninstall() methods. It’s truly powerful on the local machine. One strength of zc.buildout is isolation. One limit is that it is not really meant to be run as a sudoer. You can, but it introduces some problems. Running 2 buildouts, one as a sudoer, and another as a normal user, could solve the problem, but then you have to protect yourself against running only one of the two.
I’d like to invoke buildout as a sudoer, then, inside buildout configuration, switch from one “context” to another, i.e. tell execute this recipe as sudoer, this recipe as user “postgres”, this one as “myself”...
Another strength of zc.buildout is that it automatically discovers and installs some dependencies, such as extensions and recipes. I guess we can’t have an execution manager that implements all resources or providers, and that there would be several candidates for some resources (such as “package”). So it would be great if those dependencies where at least automatically discovered. And whenever possible, automatically installed. I suppose that discovery could be a feature bundled in the project, and installation would be implemented by consumers (i.e. buildout, pip, salt...).
Subprocess and wrappers¶
subprocess¶
When you want to perform simple things, subprocess is a bit complicated, and you’d like to have a simplified wrapper.
When you want to perform complex or repetitive tasks, you’d better write wrappers for code readability and reusability.
So, imho, in any cases, sharing common wrappers would be useful. That’s for the execution part.
About the contextual part, suprocess executes commands on the local system with the current user, current environment... I guess one would appreciate to use the same execution API whatever the target system, user, environment...
Wrappers¶
- chut
- async_subprocess
- pyutilib.subprocess
- gevent_subprocess
- EasyProcess
- sarge
- seminode.utils.command
- Command
- commandwrapper
- desub
- extcmd
- iterpipes
- pbs
- pipeline
- sh
- subwrap
- cpopen
- shellout
- clom
- envoy
- extproc
- execute
Other¶
os and os.path¶
os and os.path are really useful in daily use, especially when you are dealing with deployment or sysadmin scripts.
os and os.path provide operating system interfaces. As interfaces, the implementation could vary depending on the environment. It currently depends on local operating system. I guess one would appreciate if it depends on contextual execution environment.
I’m not talking about rewriting os module. I’m talking about a third-party provisioner which provides a higher-level interface, but with respect to contextual execution environment. The implementation for local system should use os.
References
[1] | https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spur/ |