optionalg / configdich

A configuration management system for medium to large-scale deployments of OpenWRT machines.

configdich

Featuring propriertary technology developed by the makers of TurboOlaf!

configdich is a configuration management system for medium to large-scale deployments of OpenWRT machines. By making use of templating for configuration files and the concept of inheritance for configuration options, managing a large number of OpenWRT embedded devices, each with its own distinct configuration, becomes a breeze.

Concepts

A host configuration in configdich is called a target and lives in a subdirectory of targets/. A target consists of two things:

• A config.yml that contains meta-information that is used only by configdich itself as well as variables that can later be accessed in the template rendering context
• A files/ subdirectory containing configuration file templates that are later copied to the root of the generated OpenWRT image

configdich uses inheritance to allow grouping similar configurations and to avoid redundancy. A child target inherits all configuration variables from its parent (although these can be overridden in the child configuration) as well as configuration files placed in files/ (although, again, a file in the child target will override that of a parent).

Jinja2 is used as a template engine and also supports inheritance at the template level.

Usage

First of all, you'll probably want to install all dependencies in one go by running pip install -r requirements.txt. If you don't know virtualenv yet, drop everyting and check it out now.

The actual magic happens in pavement.py and relies on Paver for an easy way to perform dirty shell tricks from within Python in a way that does not look too shady from the outside. Currently, the target name and the DNS name have to be identical for automatic deployment to work.

Use paver generate_config --host [target] to generate configuration files for a target. The finished configuration, ready to be placed in the root of and OpenWRT filesystem, will be placed in config/[target name>].

Use paver generate_image --host [target] to build a ready-to-flash OpenWRT image using the files built in the generate_config step and the package manager configuration specified by the target configuration file.

Use paver deploy --host [target] to copy the image built in the generate_image step to the target using SSH and flash it using the OpenWRT sysupgrade utility.

paver upgrade --host [target] is a shortcut that will do all three steps (generate configuration, build image, deploy) with one command.

License and Contributions

configdich was initially built by Uwe L. Korn and Leon Handreke as a proof-of-concept in an afternoon. It is licensed under an MIT License. For more information, please see the the COPYING file in the project root. Contributions in all forms are most welcome!