Machinery — A Systems Management Toolkit for Linux

Synopsis

machinery SUBCOMMAND [options]
machinery help [SUBCOMMAND]

Conceptual Overview

Machinery's core concept is the complete representation of a system by a universal system description. System descriptions are managed independently of the described systems which allows for system state conservation and offline preparation of modifications.

Machinery's subcommands work on the system description as the connecting element. System descriptions are obtained by inspecting systems, importing from other formats, manual creation or merging existing descriptions. Machinery can store and modify system descriptions to allow changes to described state of the system. System descriptions can be compared to find similarities and differences between them or analyzed to deepen the knowledge about particular aspects of the system. System descriptions may be exported to other formats and can be used to migrate or replicate systems.

Subcommands can be combined in different ways to accommodate higher-level work flows and use cases. These are some implemented and planned use cases:

Migrate a physical system to a virtual environment:

Inspect a system to obtain a system description
Export the system description to a Kiwi configuration
Build a cloud image from the configuration
Deploy the image to the cloud

Migrate a system while changing the configuration:

Inspect a system to obtain a system description
Modify the system description
Build image for deployment

Using Machinery as an extension from other formats:

Import AutoYaST profile as system description
Build image for deployment

Machinery provides an extensible set of tools which can be combined to create higher-level work flows. It is designed for environments which focus on automation, integration of diverse tools and accountable management. Machinery integrates with existing configuration management solutions to address use cases currently not covered by them.

The machinery Command

Machinery is implemented as a command line tool named machinery. The machinery command has several subcommands for specific tasks. All subcommands work with the same system description identified by an optional name which can be used by all subcommands.

System Description

The System Description format and file structure is documented in the machinery wiki: System Description Format.

Machinery validates descriptions on load. It checks that the JSON structure of the manifest file, which contains the primary and meta data of a description, is correct and it adheres to the schema. Validation errors are reported as warnings. It also checks that the information about extracted files is consistent. Missing files or extra files without reference in the manifest are treated also as warnings. All other issues are errors which need to be fixed so that Machinery can use the description. To manually validate a description use the machinery validate command.

Scopes

The system description is structured into "scopes". A scope covers a specific part of the configuration of the inspected system such as installed packages, repositories, or changed configuration files.

For example, if you are only interested in the installed packages, limit the scope to packages. This will output only the requested information.

See the Scopes documentation for a list of all supported scopes.

Options for All Subcommands

--version: Displays version of machinery tool. Exit when done.
--debug: Enable debug mode. Machinery writes additional information into the log file which can be useful to track down problems.

Files and Devices

~/.machinery/machinery.config:

Configuration file.
~/.machinery/machinery.log:

Central log file, in the format date, time, process id, and log message.
em1 (openSUSE 13.2 / openSUSE leap), eth0 (SLE11) and lan0 (SLE12):

First network device is used when DHCP in built image is enabled.

Environment

MACHINERY_LOG_FILE:

Location of Machinery's log file (defaults to ~/.machinery/machinery.log).