DO NOT USE

This project is unusable and very incomplete.

This was something I did for fun on my winter vacation. I have no intention of continuing it.

Yak

Yak is a task execution and configuration management tool. Yes, another one.

It can execute commands locally or on remote hosts. Hosts can be dynamically discovered or statically defined. Yak can connect to hosts using standard SSH but also has the ability to use other methods such as LXD.

Quickstart

1. Download Yak.

2. Create a directory:

   $ mkdir demo
   $ cd demo

3. Add some hosts to a file:

   $ echo example1.com >> hosts.txt
   $ echo example2.com >> hosts.txt

4. Create a Yak file called demo.yaml:

   targets:
     myhosts:
       type: textfile
       options:
         file: hosts.txt
   
   connections:
     ssh:
       type: ssh
       options:
         user: ubuntu
         private_key: /path/id/rsa
       targets:
         - myhosts
   
   task::install-memcached:
     steps:
       - name: install memcached
         action: apt.pkg
         input:
           name: memcached
           state: present
           sudo: true

5. Run the install-memcached task:

   $ yak run install-memcached

Documentation

See the docs directory.

Why??

Mostly to scratch an itch.

A myriad of similar tools already exist. I've pulled my favorite features from many of these tools (notably Terraform, Puppet, Ansible, and StackStorm) and created something I don't believe quite exists at the moment:

• Yak is written in Go, so it's an all-in-one binary.

• Yak is agent-less. If I'm managing 20 LXD containers, running an agent on each one feels wasteful.

• Yak can do more than just apply a standard configuration to a host. It can also run arbitrary tasks. You can have a dedicated task to bootstrap a Galera cluster and a dedicated task to manage the configuration state of the cluster once it's runing.

• Yak natively supports connection methods other than SSH. It doesn't just fork a process to call an external binary, either. For example, Yak can communicate with LXD servers directly through the LXD API. You don't need to have the LXD/LXC tools installed on your workstation to do this.

Where is Yak best used?

I see Yak as being most useful after infrastructure has been deployed. Use Terraform to build your physical and virtual infrastructure and then use Yak to configure and maintain it.

Why the name "Yak"?

Fiddling with Configuration Management is the epitome of Yak Shaving.

Building from Source

$ go get -u github.com/jtopjian/yak/...
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/jtopjian/yak/cmd
$ go build -o yak ./