TAP Integration Service - tapd

TAPs provides a lightweight integration service for existing system management databases, spreadsheets, and flat files. tapd serves this metadata in a netural, JSON format for consumption by any service, but specifically rundeck.

Overview

tapd provides an http deamon to serve system metadata in JSON for consumption by rundeck.

The underlying architecture relies on (a variation of) CGI. The decision to use CGI stems from its property as the lowest common denominator among web integration technoglogies. There are language bindings for almost every programming language and it supports system shells extremely well. Other technologies like FastCGI and SCGI are also candidates for future bindings.

Each tap will make the

How to Use

Using tapd to create new taps is extremely easy. The most common usage is the .options tap. These taps are CGI scripts that live in a predefined directory. The default directory is /var/run/taps/. Any number of directories can be created under this directory which will translate into a path of the URL.

For example: /var/run/taps/example/example1.options

#!/bin/bash

echo content-type: application/json
echo

echo [\"`uname -a`\"]

Is a typical CGI Script (not parsing any parameters). The output produces:

content-type: text/html

["Darwin noahc-mbp.local 10.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.4.0: Fri Apr 23 18:28:53 PDT 2010; root:xnu-1504.7.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386"]

Suitable for parsing in rundeck or any other automation tool.

.options JSON Format

The resulting CGI must produce a JSON Map or JSON List.

{ "Key1": "Value1", "Key2": "Value2", ... "KeyN": "ValueN", }

[ "Value1", "Value2", ..., "ValueN", ]

.resources JSON Format (proposed)

{ "{uuid}": { "hostname": "value", "ipv4": "x.x.x.x", "ipv6": "2001::XXXX", "tags": ["a","b","c","d"], } }