debuntu-tools 0.3.2

Debian and Ubuntu system administration tools

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 two programs 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

• Installation

  • Requirements

• Usage

  • debuntu-kernel-manager

  • debuntu-nodejs-installer

• Contact

• License

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 e.g. 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 install and remove packages you need apt-get and sudo privileges on the relevant system.

Usage

There are two ways to use the debuntu-tools package:

1. The command line interfaces which are described below.

2. The Python API which is documented on Read the Docs.

The following programs are documented here:

• debuntu-kernel-manager

• debuntu-nodejs-installer

debuntu-kernel-manager

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.

debuntu-nodejs-installer

Usage: debuntu-nodejs-installer [OPTIONS]

Install an up to date Node.js binary distribution on a Debian or Ubuntu system by configuring and using the NodeSource binary package repositories.

Due to the time it takes for new software releases to find their way into the Debian and Ubuntu ecosystems versus the speed with which the Node.js community is currently moving, the system packages that provide Node.js are hopelessly out of date. Fortunately the folks at NodeSource maintain Debian and Ubuntu package repositories that provide up to date Node.js binary distributions.

NodeSource makes installation scripts available and the suggested way to run these is to download and pipe them straight to a shell. That kind of rubs me the wrong way :-) but I’ve nevertheless had to set up NodeSource installations a dozen times now. One thing led to another and now there is this program.

Supported options:

Option	Description
-i, --install	Configure the system to use one of the NodeSource binary package repositories and install the ‘nodejs’ package from the repository.
-V, --version=NODEJS_VERSION	Set the version of Node.js to be installed. You can find a list of available versions on the following web page: https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/ Default: node_4.x
-s, --sources-file=FILENAME	Set the pathname of the ‘package resource list’ that will be added to the system during configuration of the NodeSource binary package repository. Default: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
-r, --remote-host=ALIAS	Perform the requested action(s) 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 [e-mail].

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.

© 2016 Peter Odding.