With the new SimpleRPC system in MCollective we have a simple interface to creating agents. The way to call an agent would be:
$ mc-rpc service status service=httpd |
This is all fine and well and easy enough, however it requires you to know a lot. You need to know there’s a status action and you need to know it expects a service argument, not great.
I’m busy adding the ability for an agent to register its metadata and interface so that 3rd party tools can dynamically generate useful interfaces.
A sample registration for service agent is:
register_meta(:name => "SimpleRPC Service Agent", :description => "Agent to manage services using the Puppet service provider", :author => "R.I.Pienaar", :license => "GPLv2", :version => 1.1, :url => "http://mcollective-plugins.googlecode.com/", :timeout => 60) ["start", "stop", "restart", "status"].each do |action| register_input(:action => action, :name => "service", :prompt => "Service Name", :description => "The service to #{action}", :type => :string, :validation => '^[a-zA-Z\-_\d]+$', :maxlength => 30): |
This includes all the meta data, versions, timeouts, validation of inputs, prompts and help text for every input argument.
Using this we can now generate dynamic UI’s, and do something like JavaDoc generated documentation. I’ve recorded a little video demonstrating a proof of concept Text UI that uses this data to generate a UI dynamically. This is ripe for integration into tools like Foreman and Puppet Dashboard.
Please watch the video here, best viewed full screen.
