SysadminToolkit

Easily create CLIs from your many and specialized scripts and tools, or code your python based plugins for advanced tasks.

Target Audience

If you are a System Administrator (server, network, storage, database, application, or any other field of expertise), and must support a somewhat large infrastructure, chances are that every group have their own set of tools with no real coding standards.

Even worse, you might need the other team's tools to troubleshoot systems you support, and a minuscule typo in one of their scripts could lead to a disaster, without talking about the complexity of maintaining centralized documentation up to date (if you even have access to their documentation that is!).

With this package, you hide the complexity of your tools (or just a subset of useful commands), describe what that does, and easily maintain this indirection.

The real end user of what you put into your toolkit might not even be you, as most of your tasks are complex and the added burden of a CLI is not worth it, but Admins from other teams could do the basic troubleshooting before requiring your actual intervention.

If you are a python coder, even a beginner, you could code your own plugin to use the CLI's features, provide commands that operators can run, log to a centralized logging server, etc.

Installation

SysadminToolkit is coded for python 2.7 on Ubuntu 12.04, and requires the following packages:

• argparse
• docutils
• Pyparsing (http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/)

Installation details to follow

Basic Usage

With a simple configuration file, you can map CLI commands to a shell command or an external script, and provide a short help of what your command does:

[shellcommand]
cmd-display_system_uptime = date \; uptime
help-display_system_uptime = Shows the current time, number of users and load

Launching the app will let you use the configured command to hide more complex tasks, and display a list of all available commands and their help:

user@somemachine:~/$ sysadmin-toolkit

sysadmin-toolkit# display system uptime
 22:40:36 up 3 days,  5:54, 21 users,  load average: 0.20, 0.09, 0.15
Fri May  3 22:40:36 GMT 2013

sysadmin-toolkit# debug commandprompt
  Loaded plugins: commandprompt, shellcommand

  Command tree (operator)
  =======================

    Definitions: non executable, executable, <dynamic>

  Keyword                                    Help (plugin)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
debug                                        Debug plugins (commandprompt)

debug commandprompt                          Displays registered commands in the
                                             current Command Prompt
                                             (commandprompt)

display system uptime                        Shows the current number of users
                                             and load (shellcommand)
[...]

Help is simple to add within your custom plugin's documentation, and presented in a convenient way:

Write documentation in reStructuredText format:

class CommandPrompt(sysadmintoolkit.plugin.Plugin):
    '''
    Description
    -----------

    Provides basic commands to the sysadmin-toolkit CLI.

    Configuration
    -------------

    *plugin-dir*
      Directory where plugins reside. Plugins must be with the .py extension.

      Default: /etc/sysadmin-toolkit/plugin.d/

Help is available in manpage format within the CLI:

sysadmin-toolkit(operator)# help commandprompt 

COMMANDPROMPT(COMMANDS)                                COMMANDPROMPT(COMMANDS)

DESCRIPTION
       Provides basic commands to the sysadmin-toolkit CLI.

CONFIGURATION
       plugin-dir
              Directory  where  plugins  reside.  Plugins must be with the .py
              extension.

              Default: /etc/sysadmin-toolkit/plugin.d/
[...]

Features

Initial release (0.1.0b) features:

• CLI Features
  • Call a command from linux's shell
  • Command completion (bash style)
  • Command conflict handling for cases where a label is entered by multiple plugins
  • "|" support to redirect a command to another process
  • Plugins can use dynamic keywords, with full autocompletion and conflict handling support
• Built-in plugins
  • commandprompt - for debugging and most built-in commands
    • help command to display a plugin's main help (written in rST format, presented in manpage format)
    • debug mode lists all registered commands
  • shellcommand - simple label to shell mapping/help
• Flexible configuration
  • Any configuration block is passed to plugins
  • Logging can be customized per plugin or globally:
    • File
    • Console
    • SysLog (remote or local)

Related projects

Plugins that leverage the toolkit for advanced features (why this project started in the first place)

• clustering - basic cluster management features (https://github.com/lpther/Clustering)
• lvs/keepalived - linux virtual server and keepalived for an any-node load balancing cluster (https://github.com/lpther/LVS and https://github.com/lpther/Keepalived)
• fibre channel - fibre channel troubleshooting toolkit
• infiniband - infiniband troubleshooting toolkit

Thanks

Khosrow Ebrahimpour for his invaluable talent and charisma