State Management? Auditing?

[deweysasser]

Should a runbook be stateful?

The idea is that a runbook could fail on a step and need to be either edited or require manual intervention, and, if so, we want to resume the runbook.

So, this might introduce the concept of "currently running" (think git's "rebase" type thing) where a run can be continues or aborted.

We might also be able to track run history.

[yoni-abtech]

Being able to pick up where a failure left off would be very very handy!

[deweysasser]

Another thought: multiple parallel runs of the same runbook, each with state?

[deweysasser]

And, last...auditing?

[ruford42]

Is logger prevalent enough cross-platform to handle the auditing role?

[ruford42]

As for state, I usually just pick a temp file and store the PID and combine that with ps or whatever is appropriate -- or you thinking something more indepth, perhaps tying into systemd, launchd, etc?

[deweysasser]

I’m thinking more of “be able to Ctrl-C and then later resume”, or even “have a step fail and exit, then you fix it and continue”. Basically, something that maintains “you are here” that spans executions.

[ruford42]

The big hurdle I see there is most commands don't fail in a recoverable way -- so the best I can think of is what you're already doing with recording the output from each step with an individual directory for each run. So, a function to iterate through /tmp/$(basename $0)-runbook-* to show previous sessions, with a ls -ltr | head -1 to give you the results of the latest step...

Though, I'm a little surprised there's no cleanup of the tmp files on a successful run. Is that something for a future release, or to be a bundled in runbook? :)

[deweysasser]

See runbook:30 -- there's a trap to remove all tmp files on exit.

[martinatactblue]

All this discussion makes me itch to get a Rundeck implementation up and running as it addresses pretty much all the topics above.

[deweysasser]

How does rundeck deal with manual steps?

[martinatactblue]

What do you want the runbook to do when you reach a manual step? Do you want the runbook to pause and wait for user input? Are we assuming that user input signifies that the step in question has been completed successfully?

[deweysasser]

Actually, thinking about this more, a bit part of the point is automate things you don't put into rundeck.

However, it would be very interesting to also create things that could be executed by rundeck. Hmmm.