origami

A templating engine which complements veewee.

Introduction

veewee makes building virtual machines easy but origami takes a step further and makes the process even easier, especially for those who wish to quickly deploy numbers of VMs that are configured differently. Without origami a typical workflow of a veewee user would be

1. Choose a template to work with.
2. veewee define my-CentOS-6.2-server CentOS-6.2-i386-netboot
3. Modify definition.rb and ks.cfg
4. veewee build box-name.

By introducing origami it becomes

1. origami --name CentOS-6.2-i386-server
2. veewee build CentOS-6.2-i386-server

Thus origami lets you bypass the editing of templates and initiate building a virtual machine immediately. Also, a wrapper for origami and veewee is available!

Configuration

Managing veewee definitions is cumbersome because it requires you to create a configuration (i.e. definition.rb and ks.cfg) on a per-distro basis. On the other hand, origami maintains configurations on a per-option basis. The power of this approach is immense when you need to maintain a long list of VMs. For example, if you want to change what packages are installed on your Oracle-5.8-i386-server, you go to a corresponding yaml file, pkgs.yml, which might look like:

# pkgs.yml
---
Oracle:
  '5.8':
    server:
    - openssh-server
    desktop:
    - openssh-server
    - ruby
  '6':
    typeA:
    - openssh-server
    - git
    typeB:
    - openssh-server
    - git
    - ruby
CentOS:
  '6': ...
    .
    .
Ubuntu:
  '10': ...
    .
    .
    .
SLES:
  '11': ...

and change the corresponding value in the yaml hash. Once you edit all yaml files (which may include boot_cmd_sequence.yml, kickstart_file, and so on), you have a whole ensemble of different flavors of distros that you can start building just from their names. I said 'all' in the previous sentence, but the number of yaml files can be small or large, depending on your needs. You need to create a yaml file for a parameter only if the parameter needs to be varied, and the others, which are fixed for any kind of VM, are specified in a master template. The end result is instead of having an ever-growing number of definitions in your veewee/definitions directory, you just have a fixed number of yaml files to configure installation parameters.

How To

origami was written for seisan-line. The documentation for seisan-line includes how to use origami.