Table of Contents
This tutorial is aimed at people learning cdist and shows typical approaches as well as gives an easy start into the world of configuration management.
This tutorial assumes you are configuring localhost, because it is always available. Just replace localhost with your target host for real life usage.
For those who just want to configure a system with the cdist configuration management and do not need (or want) to understand everything.
Cdist uses ssh for communication and transportation and usually logs into the target host as the root user. So you need to configure the ssh server of the target host to allow root logins: Edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add one of the following lines:
# Allow login only via public key PermitRootLogin without-password # Allow login via password and public key PermitRootLogin yes
As cdist uses ssh intensively, it is recommended to setup authentication with public keys:
# Generate pubkey pair as a normal user ssh-keygen # Copy pubkey over to target host ssh-copy-id root@localhost
Have a look at ssh-agent(1) and ssh-add(1) on how to cache the password for your public key. Usually it looks like this:
# Start agent and export variables eval `ssh-agent` # Add keys (requires password for every identity file) ssh-add
At this point you should be able to ssh root@localhost without re-entering the password. If something failed until here, ensure that all steps went successfully and you have read and understood the documentation.
As soon as you are able to login without password to localhost, we can use cdist to configure it. You can copy and paste the following code into your shell to get started and configure localhost:
# Get cdist # Mirrors can be found on # http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist/install/#index2h4 git clone git://git.schottelius.org/cdist # Create manifest (maps configuration to host(s) cd cdist echo '__file /etc/cdist-configured' > cdist/conf/manifest/init # Configure localhost in verbose mode ./bin/cdist config -v localhost # Find out that cdist created /etc/cdist-configured ls -l /etc/cdist-configured
That’s it, you’ve successfully used cdist to configure your first host! Continue reading the next sections, to understand what you did and how to create a more sophisticated configuration.