backplane-tools

backplane-tools offers an easy solution to install, remove, and upgrade a useful set of tools for interacting with OpenShift clusters, managed or otherwise.

Tools
FAQ - How do I...
Design

Tools

The tools currently managed by this application include:

aws (including aws_completer)
backplane-cli
ocm
osdctl
rosa

FAQ - How do I...

Quick reference guide

Install backplane-tools for the first time

1. Bash one-liner

Install backplane-tools with the following command:

go install github.com/openshift/backplane-tools@latest; backplane-tools install all

Follow instructions on screen to add tools to PATH.

2. Get, verify, and extract the release

Download the latest release for your architecture & operating system, as well as the release's checksum file. Verify the release integrity with:

sha256sum --check --ignore-missing backplane-tools_${RELEASE_TAG}_checksums.txt

where RELEASE_TAG is set to the latest release version (ie - v0.1.0). If the release file you've downloaded reports an OK status, then proceed with installation. Otherwise, retry the download.

Extract the backplane-tools asset file into a dedicated directory for easy cleanup:

mkdir -p backplane-tools_${RELEASE_TAG}/
tar -xzvf backplane-tools_${RELEASE_TAG}_${OS}_${ARCH}.tar.gz -C backplane-tools_${RELEASE_TAG}/

where OS is set to your local operating system (linux, darwin) and ARCH is set to your system architecture (arm64, amd64).

3. Bootstrap the application

Run the following to bootstrap the application:

./backplane-tools install backplane-tools

If you've never installed backplane-tools before, you will likely see a warning recommending you add additional entries to your $PATH; see the next section for steps to address this warning.

4. (Recommended) Add the tools to my $PATH

Note

By default, backplane-tools and the applications it manages are not added to your $PATH. This avoids making assumptions on how users prefer to set their $PATH (ie- some users may prefer to source a different configuration file in their shell's .rc file), and, consequently, avoid unintentional collisions between the tools backplane-tools manages and those the user self-manages. This way, if you one day wish to take over the management of a certain utility, you can easily choose to invoke that instead by placing its location earlier on your $PATH than backplane-tools' entry.

To include backplane-tools in your $PATH, add the following line to the end of your shell's startup file (such as .bashrc or .zshrc):

export PATH=${HOME}/.local/bin/backplane/latest:${PATH}

This line ensures that the directory containing the backplane-tools binary is placed at the beginning of your $PATH (assuming that $PATH is not overwritten somewhere else). If you ever want to manage a specific utility yourself, you can easily do so by placing its location earlier in your $PATH than the entry for backplane-tools.

After making this change, restart your shell (close and reopen the terminal window). To confirm that the installation was successful, run the following command:

backplane-tools list installed

If the command was able to execute and lists backplane-tools as one of the installed applications, then you can safely cleanup the release file and its contents, if you so desire.

5. (Recommended) Cleanup

Once backplane-tools successfully installs itself, you can safely remove the release file, its checksum, and its contents:

rm -rf backplane-tools_${RELEASE_TAG}*

5. (Recommended) Auth

Most of the tools are installed from Github.com, and anonymous access is heavily rate limited. To avoid this limitation, a Git Hub token will be used for authenticated access, if defined. You can create one using:

gh auth login --hostname  github.com

List available tools

backplane-tools list available

List installed tools

backplane-tools list installed

Install everything

backplane-tools install all

backplane-tools install

Install a specific thing

backplane-tools install <tool name>

Upgrade everything

backplane-tools upgrade all

Warning

Using backplane-tools upgrade all is the same as running backplane-tools install all. See the Upgrading design section for more details.

Upgrade a specific thing

backplane-tools upgrade <tool name>

Remove everything

backplane-tools remove all

Remove a specific thing

backplane-tools remove <tool name>

Design

backplane-tools strives to be simplistic and non-invasive; it should not conflict with currently installed programs, nor should it require extensive research before operating.

Directory structure

The following diagram summarizes the directory structure backplane-tools generates when managing tools on the local filesystem:

                                    $HOME/
                                      |
                                      V
                                   .local/
                                      |
                                      V
                                     bin/
                                      |
                                      V
                                  backplane/
                                      |
            -------------------------------------------------------------
           |                          |                                  |
           V                          V                                  V
        latest/                     toolA/                             toolB/ 
           |                          |                                  |
      ---------             ---------------------              ----------------//--
     |         |           |                     |            |          |         |
     V         V           V                     V            V          V         V
   linkToA linkToB     version1/             version2/    version0.1/   ...    version10.0/
                           |                     |            |                    |
                           V                     V            V                    V
                       ---------             ---------       ...              -----------
                      |         |           |         |                      |           |
                      V         V           V         V                      V           V
                  executable  README    executable* README                executable*  README

* = linked to the latest/ directory

When installing a new tool, backplane-tools will create $HOME/.local/bin/backplane/ to hold the files managed by the application, if it does not already exist. To avoid conflicts with other dependency management systems, all actions taken by backplane-tools are confined to this directory. This means that backplane-tools can be used safely alongside your system's normal package manager, 3rd party managers like flatpak or snap, and language-specific tools like pip or go install.

Next, backplane-tools creates a subdirectory $HOME/.local/bin/backplane/latest/; within which users will find links to the latest executables for each tool installed. In order to most effectively utilize backplane-tools, it's recommended this directory is added to your environment's $PATH, however there is no requirement to do so in order to utilize the application.

Finally, subdirectories are added as $HOME/.local/bin/backplane/<tool name>/ for each tool being installed, if one does not already exist. Here, backplane-tools stores the version-specific data and files needed to execute each program. How these tool-directories are organized depends on the tool itself, but generally each tool will contain one or more "versioned-directories". Each versioned-directory contains a complete installation of the tool, at the version the directory is named after. These versioned-directories are not removed during installation or upgrade, thus, if a recently upgraded tool contains incompatabilities or bugs, a previous version can still be utilized.

Installing

When installing a new tool, backplane-tools creates a basic structure as described in the above section: a parent directory containing a latest/ and one or more <tool name>/ subdirectories. Within the tool directories, it downloads, unpacks, checksums, and installs the requested tool of the same name. Because the tools are downloaded from their respective sources (usually GitHub), and not a centralized service, installation logic must be crafted specifically for each tool.

Despite the risks this places on maintainability, in practice, tools have been found to rarely change their distribution strategy. This means that, once in place, little upkeep has been required thus far. Conversely, the benefit of this design lies in it's lack of infrastructure requirements; there aren't any servers to administer or packages to maintain. This lends the tool to easy contribution or forking: in order to add a desired tool, one only needs to add the relevant logic to backplane-tools.

Finally, after performing the necessary steps to install a new version of the tool, the tool's executable is symlinked to the $HOME/.local/bin/backplane/latest/ directory, so that it can be easily invoked with the latest versions of other tools being managed by the application.

Upgrading

At present, upgrading is the exact same as installing. This means if you run backplane-tools upgrade all - you will find that all tools that backplane-tools manages will now be installed on your system.

Removing

Users are able to remove individual tools or completely remove all files and data managed by backplane-tools.

backplane-tools remove <toolA> <toolB> ... allows users to remove a specific set of tools from their system. This is done by removing the tool-specific directory at $HOME/.local/bin/backplane/<tool name>, as well as the tool's linked executable in $HOME/.local/bin/backplane/latest/.

backplane-tools remove all allows users to remove everything managed by backplane-tools. This is done by completely removing $HOME/.bin/local/backplane/. Subsequent calls to backplane-tools install will cause the directory structure to be recreated from scratch.

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backplane-tools's Introduction