francoishill / stablehand

A tool to help keep your Rancher server clean in production environments

Stablehand

A cleanup tool for Rancher servers

Stablehand is a tool designed to keep your Rancher server in a nice, clean, maintanable state under production conditions (read: when an autoscaling group is destroying your hosts).

It is intended to be run on a cron schedule to deactivate, remove and purge hosts which meet certain conditions. You would, for example, run it with the following crontab.

# Deactivate hosts which are in the reconnecting state every 15 minutes
*/15 * * * * stablehand deactivate --agent-state=reconnecting

# Remove hosts which are in the inactive state on the hour
0 * * * * stablehand remove --state=inactive

Docker

Stablehand is also available as a Docker image at sierrasoftworks/stablehand, allowing you to run this as a scheduled Docker container on your Rancher infrastructure for added-meta. When doing so, it may be easiest to use an environment file to hold your config.

CATTLE_URL=https://localhost
CATTLE_ACCESS_KEY=abcdefg
CATTLE_SECRET_KEY=abcdefg

# Deactivate hosts which are in the reconnecting state
docker run --rm --env-file stablehand.env sierrasoftworks/stablehand stablehand deactivate --agent-state=reconnecting

# Remove hosts which are in the inactive state
docker run --rm --env-file stablehand.env sierrasoftworks/stablehand stablehand remove --state=inactive

On Rancher

If you're running Stablehand on Rancher, you'll want to set the following labels to have Rancher automatically populate the CATTLE_URL, CATTLE_ACCESS_KEY and CATTLE_SECRET_KEY environment variables.

labels:
    io.rancher.container.create_agent: 'true'
    io.rancher.container.agent.role: environment

man stablehand

NAME:
   Stablehand - A tool to help you keep your Rancher server clean in production
USAGE:
   debug [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]
   
VERSION:
   1.0.0-dev.000000
   
AUTHOR(S):
   Benjamin Pannell <[e-mail]> 
   
COMMANDS:
     list        
     deactivate  [HOST_ID]
     remove      [HOST_ID]
     purge       [HOST_ID]
     help, h     Shows a list of commands or help for one command
GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --server value  The URL of your Rancher server [%CATTLE_URL%]
   --key value     The access key used to sign into your Rancher server [%CATTLE_ACCESS_KEY%]
   --secret value  The secret key used to sign into your Rancher server [%CATTLE_SECRET_KEY%]
   --help, -h      show help
   --version, -v   print the version
   
COPYRIGHT:
   Sierra Softworks © 2016