gitstrap

Store your bootstrap configuration in github gists, compose into recipes. Boostrapping recipes change from time to time. Gists are nice because they're one-off, low-maintenance, hosted, and can easily change over time.

While this is aimed at Amazon EC2, it can, of course, be used anywhere.

Using

This can be invoked on any machine with curl, tar, and bash. Of course, you can provide any interpretere you'd like in each of the recipes on the hashbang line:

gs_url='https://raw.github.com/dlecocq/gitstrap/master/gitstrap.sh'
curl -s $gs_url | bash -s - gist [gist [...]]

If a gist contains multiple files, it will attempt to run all of those files in the order they appear in ls. If the order of execution is important, you should order their names lexigoraphically.

It also supports downloading any tarball that has a bunch of shell scripts. Or if a single uncompressed script is more your style, that's possible, too.

Example

By way of an example, I created a gist for building hypertable (I was having a lot of trouble with this before). In it, I have a number of files like 0-dependencies.sh or 3-bdb.sh, and these are each shell scripts and executed in order when I say:

# If I don't have gitstrap installed locally
gs_url='https://raw.github.com/dlecocq/gitstrap/master/gitstrap.sh'
curl -s $gs_url | bash -s - https://gist.github.com/3085130

# Alternatively,
gitstrap.sh https://gist.github.com/3085130

This downloads the packaged tarball gists locally, unpacks it, and run each of the scripts contained therein.

Using on EC2

EC2 instances can be started with user data. Interestingly enough, this user data is interpreted as a script if it begins with a hashbang line. So, if you were to supply:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
gs_url='https://raw.github.com/dlecocq/gitstrap/master/gitstrap.sh'
curl -s $gs_url | bash -s - gist [gist [...]]

as your user data when starting an instance, when it boots, it would run all the gists provided at those urls.

Installing

If you'd like to use it more regularly, you can also install gitstrap:

git clone https://github.com/dlecocq/gitstrap.git
cd gitstrap
./gitstrap.sh install