batou 2.2.4

A utility for automating multi-host, multi-environment software builds and deployments.

batou helps you to automate your application deployments:

• You create a model of your deployment using a simple but powerful Python API.
• You configure how the model applies to hosts in different environments.
• You verify and run the deployment with the batou utility.

Getting started with a new project is easy:

mkdir myproject
cd myproject
git init
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flyingcircusio/batou/master/bootstrap | sh
git commit -m "Start a batou project."

Here's a minimal application model:

$ mkdir -p components/myapp
$ cat > components/myapp/component.py
from batou.component import Component
from batou.lib.python import VirtualEnv, Package
from batou.lib.supervisor import Program

    class MyApp(Component):

        def configure(self):
            venv = VirtualEnv('2.7')
            self += venv
            venv += Package('myapp')
            self += Program('myapp',
                command='bin/myapp')

And here's a minimal environment:

$ mkdir environments
$ cat > environments/dev.cfg
[environment]
connect_method = local

[hosts]
localhost = myapp

To deploy this, you run:

$ ./batou deploy dev

Check the detailed documentation to get going with a more ambitious project.

Features

• Separate your application model from environments
• Supports idempotent operation for incremental deployments
• Deploy to multiple hosts simultaneously
• Automated dependency resolution for multi-host scenarios
• No runtime requirements on your application
• Encrypted secrets with multiple access levels: store your SSL certificates, SSH keys, service secrets and more to get true 1-button deployments.
• Deploy to local machines, Vagrant, or any SSH host
• Broad SSH feature support by using OpenSSH through execnet
• Only few dependencies required on the remote host
• Ships with a library of components for regularly needed tasks
• self-bootstrapping and self-updating - no additional scripting needed

License

The project is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license.

Changelog

2.2.4 (2021-02-11)

• Repair File(group=), it now works just like File(owner=)

• Remove debugging code from secrets editing which caused encryption errors to crash and loose unsaved edits. (#139)

• Fix shipping of deployment code with git-bundle when using a branch. Before the entire branch history was uploaded with each deployment to each host (#131)

• Allow specifying a custom pip version in AppEnv.

2.2.3 (2021-01-20)

• Fix #124: notifications crashed when trying to display environment names but used environment objects.

2.2.2 (2020-12-14)

• Another brownbag release - connecting to remote hosts was broken after refactoring due to missing test coverage. Fixed and added coverage.

2.2.1 (2020-12-14)

• Fix error reporting that was partially broken in 2.2.

2.2 (2020-12-10)

• Add secret files in addition to secret overrides. Using ./batou secrets edit {environment} {example.yaml} you can now create multiple files that are all encrypted using the environment's keys.

  To access those secrets you can read them from environment.secret_files['{example.yaml}'] in your deployment.

  This feature is useful to embed longer data or formats that are hard to embed syntactically into the cfg/ini style of the main secrets file.

• Fix bug preventing to use nagios=True in Supervisor components, introduced in batou 2.1. (#98)

• Make batou compatible with Python 3.9, ie asyncio's all_tasks has been moved to a new location. (#93)

• Actually silence SilentConfiguration errors.

• Consider unknown secret overrides (components and attributes) to be a configuration error.

2.1 (2020-09-09)

• Bug 81: provide explicit support for JSON- and YAML-files with proper integration to the new diff support and the ability to update data through a "dict merge" approach.

• Bug 77: use ConfigUpdater so comments are kept when editing secrets.

• Bug 1: provide better error message if remote user does not exist.

  This is also cleaning up the general error output and we're now hiding full tracebacks unless batou is run with --debug. People keep complaining about traceback output and I agree that it makes things harder to read for someone not used to scanning through them quickly.

• Bug 63: provide better error message if GPG is missing.

• Bug 65: don't allow passing undefined namevars or undefined attributes to the component constructor. Also prohibit (accidentally) overriding methods.

• Bug: zsh compatibility on the remote host was broken with more complex sudo mechanism. Added a ZSH workaround.

2.0 (2020-07-15)

• Ignore directories when verifying archive extractions to avoid false non-convergence.

2.0b14 (2020-06-25)

• Make sudo properly conditional if we log in directly with the service user, but avoid adding a re-connect performance penalty.

2.0b13 (2020-06-25)

• Fix git clone when cloning into the component work directory. #27

• Fix binary file handling that broke during 2to3 migration and the test was doing the wrong thing.

• Allow marking file content as sensitive, which - for now - will suppress diff generation/logging.

• Allow specifying the service_user attribute per host.

• Bugfixes for file components so that verify() is more robust in predictive runs.

• Add argument 'predicting' to the verify() function signature. This argument can be accepted optionally (so we're backwards compatible) and will indicate that we're doing a predictive run so we can avoid failing when trying to rely on output from earlier components.

• Allow the Content component to predict a change based on a not-yet-realized source file on the target system.

• Limit parallel connection setup to 5 connections at once. Also, retry up to 3 times per connection and stagger retries according to a CSMA/CD schema. This helps make connection setup more reliable if using SSH jump hosts where many connections may cause sshd's MaxStart to start rejecting new connections. (#55)

• Allow adding data-* overrides to host sections in environments' secrets files.

• Reduce AppEnv component directory hashes to 8 byte to avoid the shebang (#!) 127 character path limit.

• Improve verify() of archive handler so we predict a change if something goes wrong (like not having the archive downloaded yet)

• Fix "is supervisor program running" check if it is stopped or exited

2.0b12 (2020-05-13)

• Fix broken sort of configuration errors. (#52)

2.0b11 (2020-05-13)

• Fix "is supervisord running" check in the Supervisor(enable=False) case

2.0b10 (2020-05-11)

• Fix Python 3 compatibility for Debian logrotate component.

• Improve output ordering and formatting. The diffs for predicted (or applied) changes now appear in proper order.

• Provide better error messages when batou fails to lock a secret file.

2.0b9 (2020-05-09)

• Refactor the appenv component into smaller components (and move it to batou.lib.appenv.

• Always update pip when installing an appenv - this also fixes the Travis tests.

2.0b8 (2020-05-08)

• Replace 'Deploying <xxx>' with 'Scheduling' as this is only the moment where we decide that a component is not blocked by another any longer and can done as soon as the worker pool is able to do it. Specifically this means that the following output isn't necessarily from this component.

• Mark the hostname for each deployed component in the breadcrumb output so that asynchronously deployed components can be visually identified correctly.

• Show diff of file changes - both during predict and deployment - to better estimate whether template changes are as expected.

2.0b7 (2020-05-07)

• Update embedded appenv to support Python 3.4+.

• Add component AppEnv to manage virtualenvs similar to the appenv package superseding previous virtualenv and buildout components.

• Allow using assert statements instead of batou.UpdateNeeded.

• Ensure the working directory is the defdir during the configure phase to allow using relative path names.

2.0b6 (2020-04-24)

• Various smaller fixes to get the remoting code working again.

• Update supervisor to 4.1 and Python 3.

• Allow specifying major versions for virtualenvs (i.e. '2' and '3') to get convergence for virtualenvs where we don't control the minor version of the targets.

• Add ability to disable supervisor programs.

• Remove '--fast' and '--reset' mode as this isn't needed/ supported by appenv at the moment.

• Simplify SSH/sudo and try sudo first. Probably needs further attention once we're along the release cycle.

• Fix Python 2.7 virtualenvs - upgrade to latest old-style release of virtualenv.

2.0b5 (2020-04-15)

• Switch to new bootstrapping/self-installing pattern "appenv". See appenv.py for a work-in-progress schema.

2.0b4 (2020-01-13)

• Fix incorrect long->int conversion from 2to3. (Mercurial support)

• Fix brownbag release due to missing support files.

2.0b3 (2020-01-10)

• Fix Python3 compatibility for logrotate and crontab

• Add six as dependency, so deployments can be made compatible to both Python 2 and 3 more easy.

2.0b2 (2019-10-15)

General

• Make encryption/decryption error prompt more readable.

• Fix coding style issues.

Features

• Add coarse grained parallelization of deployments.

  Using asyncio we now schedule rooot components for deployment as soon as all their dependencies are completed. However, due to execnet being synchronous this only has a visible effect for components on multiple hosts. This will speed up long running multi-host deployments.

  In the future this will become more fine-grained so that we can even deploy multiple independent components on the same host in parallel.

Bugs

• Fix issue #5: allow using % in secrets similar to regular overrides.

• Fix secrets editing, add test coverage for the affected code.

Testing

• Relax global pytest timeouts to avoid slow network failures.

• Switch from broken/abandoned pytest-codecheckers to pytest-flake8

• Enable flake8, remove unused pytest markers.

• Fix warnings

• Make warnings errors.

Build system / Development environment

• Update example batou scripts

• Fix travis build environments. Support Python 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8-dev and nightly (also 3.8 currently).

• Generalize development bootstrapping code for dual use in local and travis environments.

2.0b1 (2019-10-11)

• Drop support for Python 2.

• Move to Python 3.5+.

  A smooth migration mechanism may become available in the future based on users' needs.

• The default hash function is now 'sha512', existing deployments need to be migrated manually.