PDB CLI

A native PuppetDB command line client. This project intends to be a quick way to interact with PuppetDB via the command line. Things like executing a query, viewing results and eventually import/export.

Status

This is pretty early yet, more of a hack day project and a proof of concept. Nodes querying works and can use mutually authenticated SSL to connect to PuppetDB. Non-SSL connections work as well. Import/Export worked on a previous prototype, still needs to be added to the current one. Other endpoints also need to be added. Likely nodes.rkt will switch to something more general and be a git style subcommand, i.e. pdb nodes ....

Config

The pdb-cli wants a ~/.pdbrc file that contains an alias for a puppetdb instance along with certificate information. ~/.pdbrc looks like:

{"default_host": "pdb-prod",
 "hosts": {"pdb-prod": {"root_url": "https://<puppetdb host name>:8081",
                        "ca": "/path/to/ca.pem",
                        "cert": "/path/to/<client-cert>.pem",
                        "key": "/path/to/<client-key>.pem"}}}

The easiest way to get those is to use puppet's cert generation facility, copy the public/private/ca certs from puppet and add the public cert to PuppetDB's certificate whitelist.

The tool also supports non-SSL communication:

{"default_host": "pdb-prod",
 "hosts": {"pdb-prod": {...}}
           "pdb-dev":  {"root_url": "http://localhost:8080"}}}

Building/Running

To build this, you only need Racket installed. It will probably work with earlier versions of Racket, but it was developed and tested with 6.2.1. The example below assume Racket installed and the Racket bin directory is on your $PATH.

An easy way to run the tool from the command line during development is to run the following (from this directory):

racket nodes.rkt -q "[\"~\",\"certname\",\".*\"]"

To build a standalone copy of pdb-cli run:

$ raco exe nodes.rkt

With this you can run the same code as the racket invocation above:

$./nodes -q "[\"~\",\"certname\",\".*\"]"

This creates a standalone binary, but to distribute it, you need the supporting racket libraries to be bundled with it. This can be created with the following command

$ raco distribute nodes-dist nodes

This will create a new nodes-dist directory and put the nodes binary along with the needed supporting libs in that directory. That directory can be zipped up and ran on another system without installing Racket. This has been tested on OS X (Yosemite), Debian 7 and Windows 2012.