SimpleGate

SimpleGate makes it possible to use net/ssh/gateway’s capabilities in a simple to use way. This makes it possible to write simple scripts that access servers that are located several hops inside a network.

The core gateway chaining logic was taken from Capistrano, but it has been rewritten to be useful in a more generic way than Capistrano allows.

SimpleGate’s Router class makes it possible to automatically find a route through a maze of servers instead of having to manually define gateway chains. An added benefit is that a change to one server’s connections no longer requires you to update all other servers if they relied on it as a gateway.

SimpleGate is simple, meaning it does not (yet) do fancy things such as using ~/.ssh. Because of this, you’ll have to define ~/.servers.yml and add entries to configure your servers. To use the routing functionality used by the gate_cp and simple_gate executables, you have to define routes in ~/.servers.connections.yml

An example configuration for the servers ‘foobar’ and ‘barfoo’ would look be:

  ---
  foobar:
    address: "127.0.0.1"
    username: "foo"
    password: "bar
    port: 22
  barfoo:
    address: "192.168.0.1"
    username: "bar"
    password: "foo
    port: 22

Example of a ~/.servers.connections.yml file:

  ---
  local:
  - foo
  foo:
  - bar
  - baz
  bar:
  - foobar
  - foobaz
  - barbaz

All keys are names of servers defined in ~/.servers.yml. The only special node is "local", which is the starting point for all connections and not a real connection.

Recent changes

Version 0.5.2

• Added -V verbose flag to gate_cp
• Use STDERR for status messages. STDOUT is used to output SSH responses
• Updated executables to support direct server connections
• SimpleGate#through_to can connect directly to a server without gateways

Version 0.5.1

• Updated readme and simple_gate documentation
• Implemented infinite loop prevention code in Router#find
• Cleaned up Router#find to be more readable
• Added spec to show stack overflow occurs when a cyclical graph is used to find a route
• Added specs for Router#find
• Added a -V (verbose) flag option to simple_gate
• Removed empty method definition

Version 0.5.0

• Added syntax explanation to gate_cp
• Added gate_cp, which copies one local file to a remote destination

Version 0.4.1

• simple_gate is now executable

Version 0.4.0

• Updated readme with version history for previous gem versions
• Added simple_gate executable to use SimpleGate’s new Router class to find a path to a server and execute a command there.

Version 0.3.0

• Readme now has a project description and updated credits for a bit of Capistrano code
• Added mutator and documentation for ServerDefinition.servers
• Updated comment to make more sense

Version 0.2.0

• Implemented SimpleGate#through_to, which establishes a real ssh session through a number of gateways

Version 0.1.0

• Removed simple_gate executable
• Imported SimpleGate and ServerDefinition

Version 0.0.1

• Created project

Installation

From git

From the project root, use rake to install.

  git clone http://github.com/Narnach/simple_gate
  cd simple_gate
  rake install

This will build the gem and install it for you.

About

simple_gate was created by Wes Oldenbeuving. It is licensed under the MIT license.

SimpleGate#through is based on GatewayConnectionFactory#initialize, which is part of Jamis Buck’s Capistrano and is also licensed under the MIT license.