Bork, your Sweedish Chef Puppet

Bork puts the 'sh' back into IT. Bork Bork Bork.

Bork is a bash-based DSL for system configuration management. Its goal is to provide a zero-dependency solution for making assertions about the state of a system and when needed, truthing them.

by Matthew Lyon matthew@lyonheart.us

Bare Minimum Requirements

Bork is written against Bash 3.2. It may not perfectly run there yet, and that's where you come in :) The goal is to run out-of-box on any modern UNIX system, whcih should (hopefully) include sed, awk and grep.

If you're going to use it, you'll presumably need a way to copy files to your target machine, such as scp or curl.

Why

You might ask, why not use Chef or Puppet instead? Good question. They're existing mature tools for doing this kind of thing, with vibrant communities. However after working with both, I wanted something dramatically simpler and less opinionated.

Bork is a shell program. You run it how you want.

Concepts

Configs

A config is a bash script that is run under a bork "harness" that makes assertions about the state of a system. A basic config would look like this:

use brew git github           # pulls these assertions out of stdlib into use
ok git                        # asserts system pkg manager has git package installed
ok directories ~/code         # asserts ~/code exists
destination push ~/code       # uses the "destination stack" to change the working directory
                              #   using this over pushd has some benefits
ok github mattly/dotfiles     # asserts code from git@github.com:mattly/dotfiles 
                              #   exists in ~/code/dotfiles
ok brew vim                   # asserts homebrew has installed vim
destination push vim/bundle
ok github tpope/vim-pathogen  # asserts pathogen installed from github
ok github shougo/vimproc      # asserts vimproc installed from github
if did_update; then           # if vimproc was installed or upgraded, then re-run make
  (cd vimproc && make clean && make)
fi

This config could be tested by bork with bork status vim.sh or satisfied with bork satisfy vim.sh. In the future, I'd like to provide a 'compile' option to generate a single, portable shell script.

Assertions

An assertion is basically something like:

"this package should be installed"
"this directory should exist"
"these files should exist from somewhere else on the internet"
"this file should be symlinked to somewhere else or have these permissions"

Use your imagination. Look in core/ and stdlib/ and see the existing ones:

pkg: a pass-through to the system package manager.
brew: homebrew, used by the above
apt: apt, used by pkg
git: code from a git repository
github: like previously, but with a github url pattern
directories: that certain directories exist
symlink: that certain files are symlinked elsewhere

More assertion types are planned:

other package managers: apt, yum, etc.
VCS managers: hg, darcs
PL package managers: npm, rubygems, pip, cabal, etc. Note that bork is intended for global installation of these packages, not per-project; tools like Bundler or package.json are more appropriate for project-level assertions.
Cron jobs, init.d files, launchctl tasks, etc
Files exist with certain text, and some kind of template renderer
OS X settings via defaults

Look At All The Things It's NOT Doing

To the degree Bork is opinionated, it is very opinionated about what it does not want responsibility for:

Collaboration: Use GitHub. Or Whatever.
Versioning: Bring your own VCS. Git, Mercurial, Darcs, CVS or whatever.
Orchestration: There are plenty of good tools that do this already. Fabric and Capistrano come immediately to mind.
Role Management: Just include another config. Compose configs from sub-configs.
Hardcore Dependency Management: This should be outsourced to your package manager, then managed inline in your scripts. For example, the 'rbenv' package should be installed before calling an rbenv source. This is coding 101, people. It ain't that hard.

zeroecco / bork