Playing around with runbooks in the context of tasks that have to be done now in then in our infrastructure.

Runbooks idea is gradual automation, you start with no-op scripts that just define the necessary steps and then you start slowly filling the gaps and automate parts of the process.

This repository also comes with a script to generate the markdown rendering of the processes (runbooks).

run bundle to install the runbook and other dependencies (you need to have ruby version >= 2.3 installed for all that).

To cover all steps, use ./new_operation.rb <NAME_OF_RUNBOOK>, where NAME_OF_RUNBOOK is e.g. it/do_the_task.

This will create the runbook it/do_the_task.rb, make it executable and add it to the list of runbooks for which markdown doc generation is done when ./runbooks_to_md.rb is executed.

The script will take care of

runbook generate runbook it/do_the_task
chmod +x it/do_the_task.rb
echo it/do_the_task.rb >> runbooks_to_md.rb
$EDITOR it/do_the_task.rb

.

TBD. Currently look for lib/<pathtorunbook>. Put tests into test/<pathtorunbook>.

The runbooks are executables. Run them from the base-directory (e.g. it/add_ldap_user.rb).

Or runbook exec <path_to_runbook>, or (without input) runbook exec --auto <path_to_runbook>.

it/add_ldap_user does load the file ldap.env as environment variables, if present and the gem dotenv is installed.

• it/add_ldap_user.rb: Add a new LDAP user to the directory.
• …

See doc/index (or doc/ directory) for a list and details about runbooks.

After editing the code, update the documentation / markdown view with

./runbooks_to_md.rb

Execute runbooks_to_md.rb to populate doc/ folder (TODO: make this a rake task? Or a runbook itself? …).
To incorporate new runbooks, edit runbooks_to_md.rb and include the file. Note that this will be done for you if you add new runbooks via the new_operation.md <nameoftask> script given above.

You can use madness (gem install madness) to fire up a webserver that displays the markdown files.

rake or rake test, done with MiniTest.

Yay! Happy! Drop me a line.

Copyright 2019 Felix Wolfsteller, released under the GPLv3+ License (contained as file LICENSE in this repository).