The infrastrucure middleman

Broker is a tool designed to provide a common interface between one or many services that provision virtual machines. It is an abstraction layer that allows you to ignore (most) of the implementation details and just get what you need.

dnf install cmake
cd <broker root directory>
pip install .
cp broker_settings.yaml.example broker_settings.yaml

Then edit the broker_settings.yaml file

Broker can also be ran outside of its base directory. In order to do so, specify the directory broker's files are in with the BROKER_DIRECTORY envronment variable. BROKER_DIRECTORY=/home/jake/Programming/broker/ broker inventory

Checking out a VM

broker checkout --workflow "workflow-name" --workflow-arg1 something --workflow-arg2 else

You can pass in any arbitrary arguments you want

Nicks

Broker allows you to define configurable nicknames for checking out vms. Just add yours to setting.yaml and call with the --nick option

broker checkout --nick rhel7

Duplicating a VM

Broker offers another shortcut for checking out a VM with the same recipe as one already checked out by Broker. This is via the duplicate command.

broker duplicate my.awesome.vm.com
broker duplicate 0
broker duplicate 1 3

Listing your VMs

Broker maintains a local inventory of the VMs you've checked out. You can see these with the inventory command.

broker inventory

Checking in VMs You can also return a VM to its provider with the checkin command. You may use either the local id (broker inventory), the hostname, or "all" to checkin everything.

broker checkin my.host.fqdn.com
broker checkin 0
broker checkin 1 3 my.host.fqdn.com
broker checkin --all

Creating nicks Broker will attempt to help your create your own nicks with the nick-help command. If supported by your chosen provider, nick-help will display the additional arguments you can use when defining a new nick.

broker nick-help --help
broker nick-help --workflow my-awesome-workflow

Additionally, if you're unfamiliar with what actions are supported by your provider, you can get a list by passing the provider's name.

broker nick-help --provider AnsibleTower

Run arbitrary actions If a provider action doesn't result in a host creation/removal, Broker allows you to execute that action as well. There are a few output options available as well.

broker execute --help
broker execute --workflow my-awesome-workflow --additional-arg True
broker execute -o raw --workflow my-awesome-workflow --additional-arg True

Run Broker in the background Certain Broker actions can be run in the background, these currently are: checkout, checkin, duplicate, and execute. When running a command in this mode, it will spin up a new Broker process and no longer log to stderr. To check progress, you can still follow broker's log file. Note that background mode will interfere with output options for execute since it won't be able to print to stdout. Those should kept in log mode.

broker checkout --background --nick rhel7
broker checkin -b --all
broker duplicate -b 0
broker execute -b --workflow my-awesome-workflow --artifacts