Debian and Ubuntu system administration tools
Project description
The debuntu-tools package is my playground for experiments in automating system administration tasks on Debian and Ubuntu Linux systems. Right now there’s just a single command and no test suite, but I intend to keep working on this package in order make it a lot more useful. For usage instructions please refer to following sections and the documentation.
Contents
Status
Right now debuntu-tools is just an experiment and as such I’m not making any claims about or commitments towards usability, reliability or backwards compatibility. I guess we’ll see how long it’s going to take me to consider this more than an experiment :-).
Installation
The debuntu-tools package is available on PyPI which means installation should be as simple as:
$ pip install debuntu-tools
There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these instructions ;-).
Requirements
Several Python packages are required by debuntu-tools but installation of the Python package should automatically pull in those dependencies for you.
You need to be running a Debian or Ubuntu derived Linux distribution, or at least you need a functional dpkg installation. This enables version sorting according to the semantics used by dpkg, which is quite significant if your goal is to remove older kernels but preserve newer ones :-).
To actually remove packages you need apt-get and sudo privileges on the relevant system.
Usage
There are two ways to use the debuntu-tools package:
A command line interface which is described below.
A Python API which is documented on Read the Docs.
Command line
Usage: debuntu-kernel-manager [OPTIONS] – [APT_OPTIONS]
Detect and remove old Linux kernel header and image packages that can be safely removed to conserve disk space and speed up apt-get runs that install or remove kernels.
By default old packages are detected and reported on the command line but no changes are made. To actually remove old packages you need to use the -c, --clean or --remove option. Using the following command you can perform a dry run that shows you what will happen without actually doing it:
$ debuntu-kernel-manager --remove -- --dry-run
The debuntu-kernel-manager program is currently in alpha status, which means a first attempt at a usable program has been published but there are no guarantees about what it actually does. You have been warned :-).
Supported options:
Option |
Description |
---|---|
-c, --clean, --remove |
Remove Linux kernel header and/or image packages that are deemed to be safe to remove. The use of this option requires sudo access on the system in order to run the ‘apt-get remove’ command. |
-f, --force |
When more than one Linux kernel meta package is installed the -c, --clean and --remove options will refuse to run apt-get and exit with an error instead. Use the -f or --force option to override this sanity check. |
-r, --remote-host=ALIAS |
Detect and remove old Linux kernel header and image packages on a remote host over SSH. The ALIAS argument gives the SSH alias that should be used to connect to the remote host. |
-v, --verbose |
Increase verbosity (can be repeated). |
-q, --quiet |
Decrease verbosity (can be repeated). |
-h, --help |
Show this message and exit. |
Contact
The latest version of debuntu-tools is available on PyPI and GitHub. The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.
License
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2016 Peter Odding.
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