System Description

The System Description format and file structure is documented in the machinery wiki: https://github.com/SUSE/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.

Use Cases

Some of the important use cases of Machinery are:

• Inspecting a System and Collecting Information

Collecting a variety of information. Limit the gathered information with scopes (see section about scopes). Each inspection step updates the system description.

• Reviewing System Description

After a successful inspection, the system description can be displayed on the console or the output can be fed into other tools.

• Cloning a System

An inspected system can be cloned. The inspection step returns a system description which is used as the basis for cloning physical or virtual instances. Machinery can build a system image from the description, which can then for example be deployed to a cloud.

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.