genesis

Genesis

Genesis is a Go library for building stand-alone installers. It is intended as a configuration management utility for embedded systems, but it can be used for pretty much any system.

Genesis can install, uninstall (reverse all installation steps), and report status. You can construct groups of tasks, define sections, and have tasks/groups/sections run conditionally based on the actions of other tasks/groups/sections. You can tell it to re-run certain steps or sections, and/or to skip some.

Status

This is experimental software, with high API instability. However, I am currently using it in my own work.

Motivation

Traditional configuration management systems (chef, ansible, etc.) don't work well for embedded systems because they tend to assume:

• the target is accessible by network and the network has been configured
• the target is running an ssh server
• supporting software has been installed (python, chef client, etc).

Genesis is designed to configure a system from scratch. See the doc directory for more information.

Example

Here is a very simple example:

package main

import (
    "github.com/wx13/genesis/installer"
    "github.com/wx13/genesis/modules"
)

func main() {

    inst := installer.New()
    defer inst.Done()

    inst.AddTask(modules.Mkdir{Path: "/tmp/genesis_example"})

    aptSection := installer.NewSection("Install some debian packages.")
    pkgs := []string{"git", "gitk", "tig", "screen"}
    for _, pkg := range pkgs {
        aptSection.AddTask(modules.Apt{Name: pkg})
    }
    inst.Add(aptSection)

}

which produces this:

See the example directory for more examples.

Build

To build the installer, first zip up the supporting files:

zip -r files.zip files

Now build the executable and append the zip file:

go build my_installer.go
cat files.zip >> my_installer
zip -A my_installer

This packages the zip file into the installer binary, so that it is completely standalone. Run the binary with the -install, -status, or -remove flags to install / check status / remove.