dparrish.com

There’s been enough actual interest in Rollout for me to move it to a community site. I chose Google Code because I work there, and it’s much faster than Sourceforge.

The new URL for Rollout is: http://code.google.com/p/rollout.

Unfortunately they don’t support git, so I have to deal once again with Subversion.

The new checkout instructions are:
svn checkout http://rollout.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rollout

The manual is online there, and an issue tracker, so submit bugs!

I’ve decided that after 8 months of using Rollout on a daily basis, I should publish a “stable” 1.0 release.

You can get the 1.0 stable release at http://dparrish.com/files/rollout-1.0.tar.gz.

Although this is stable and shouldn’t destroy any of your systems, it does still (and will always) require configuration before it will work for you.

As always, the latest version is available by git:

git clone http://git.dparrish.com/rollout

Comments / bug reports / flames are more than welcome.

Tags: rollout

I can’t stand it when people release open source software, expect people to use it, and don’t provide any sort of documentation. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys writing doco, but I do think it’s required.

So here, in it’s entirety: the Rollout Manual
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Announcing a new Open-Source project: Rollout!

Rollout is a system developed to automate system administration on UNIX servers. It is primarily focused towards Linux, but could be adapted to Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.

It is written purely in Perl, and the configuration is also a Perl source file. Some Perl knowledge is required to edit the configuration, but copy-and-paste may suffice.

System Administration can generally be reduced to a set of steps, which must be completed in order. Some example steps include:

* Copy files, create symlinks
* Edit configuration files
* Start / stop services
* Add / modify users & groups
* Install applications

The idea behind Rollout is to automate all these steps in a configurable way. Rollout is by design idempotent - it can be run many times on a single server and produce the same results.

There is a certain amount of overlap between this and other projects such as puppet and cfengine. They all have similar goals. Rollout is designed to be very easy to extend (as long as you can cope with Perl) and very fast.

You can get rollout from my git repository at http://git.dparrish.com/rollout. If you’re using Cogito, you can run:

cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/rollout

This is the first public release, and as such is not expected to be everything to everybody. However it is in active production use and hasn’t destroyed anything yet. Use it at your own risk. The documentation included contains instructions on setting up a server and configuring clients.

Also, I’m enabling comments on this post (and I feel dirty doing it) so that people can submit bugs/patches/requests/complaints.