Writing plugins to wrap a command in mcollective is very easy.
What is difficult is figuring out all of the conventions that you need to follow.
I’m going to walk you through an example with some tips.
Conventions you need to follow
1) Agents need to go in the agent directory. You can find it with the following command
sudo find / -name rpcutil.ddl -exec dirname {} \;
2) The file name should be all lowercase with a file mode of 644
test@mcollectivemaster:/usr/share/mcollective/plugins/mcollective/agent$ ls -l wrapit.rb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1127 2012-04-13 19:05 wrapit.rb
3) The class name needs to match the file name with at least the first letter capitalized.
4) To more easily debug make sure the following two lines are present in your /etc/mcollective/server.cfg so you can find errors in syslog
logger_type = syslog loglevel = debug
5) Restart mcollective between changes to the agent file
An example agent
module MCollective module Agent class Wrapit < RPC::Agent ################################################################### metadata :name => "My Agent", :description => "Example of how to wrap a command", :author => "Me <me@example.com>", :license => "DWYWI", :version => "0.1", :url => "http://blog.mague.com", :timeout => 10 ################################################################### #functions def run_command(cmd) cmdrun = IO.popen(cmd) output = cmdrun.read cmdrun.close if $?.to_i > 0 logger.error "WRAPIT: #{cmd}: #{output}" reply.fail! "ERROR: failed with #{output}" end output end ################################################################### #actions action "ping" do reply[:info] = run_command("/bin/ping -c 5 #{request[:target]}") end ################################################################### end #class end #agent end #module
Mcollective uses the request data structure to receive information from the client and reply to send information back to the client. The actions are methods that the client calls to run.
When running commands be sure to wrap with IO.popen so that you can capture both the output and pass the error code. Do not forget to close the popen or you will leak file handles and cause trouble.
An Example Client
#!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'rubygems' if RUBY_VERSION < "1.9" require 'mcollective' include MCollective::RPC args = {} action="" options = rpcoptions do |parser, options| parser.on('-K', '--targ TARGET', 'Target to test against') do |v| args[:target] = v end parser.on('-S', '--action ACTION', 'action') do |v| action = v end end mc = rpcclient("wrapit", :options => options) #mc.fact_filter "servertype", "/myservertype/" mc.timeout = 10 mc.progress = false mc.send(action, args).each do |resp| if resp[:statusmsg] == "OK" puts resp[:sender] puts resp[:data][:info] else puts "ERROR:" p resp end end
The RPC includes all kinds of switches so be sure to run your script with -h to make sure none of your arguments overlap as they will be overwritten by the default switches.
You can add your own fact_filters and turn off the progress bar which is useful with web interfaces.
Be sure to check the statusmsg sent back from the agent, so you can catch any errors.
Since developer access is limited in my work environment, I wrote lots of customer agents to allow troubleshooting and deployment to be coordinated. Putting them behind a Sinatra web front end has made life easier for all.
Update:It was kindly pointed out to me by R.I. Pienaar that instead of using popen, there is a built-in run() function that is even more flexible.
cmd_output = [] cmd_error = "" run ( "/bin/ping -c #{request[:target}", :environment => {"MYSETTING" => "ABC123"} :cwd => "/home/testguy", :stdout => cmd_output, :sdterr => cmd_error, )
