boltwash

A Wash plugin for Bolt. This plugin presents a view of Bolt targets organized by groups, and allows you to navigate their filesystems

wash . > stree bolt
bolt
└── [group]
    └── [target]
        └── fs

As an example, suppose you have a cluster of machines that are having problems

wash bolt/webservers > ls
server1/
server2/
server3/

You've noticed an issue in one of their logs, and want to see if it's present everywhere

wash bolt/webservers > grep OutOfMemory */fs/var/log/syslog
server1/fs/var/log/syslog:Jan 28 12:09:34 server1 my-server[435]: ...java.lang.OutOfMemoryError...
server2/fs/var/log/syslog:Jan 28 12:09:43 server2 my-server[435]: ...java.lang.OutOfMemoryError...
server3/fs/var/log/syslog:Jan 28 12:09:01 server3 my-server[435]: ...java.lang.OutOfMemoryError...

Seeing that they're all experiencing these issues, let's see where the server process is still running

wash bolt/webservers > wps * | grep bin/java
server1     9027   12:10.02   /usr/bin/java -Xmx2048m -cp /opt/my-server/server.jar ...
server2    21204   12:13.02   /usr/bin/java -Xmx2048m -cp /opt/my-server/server.jar ...

Looks like they've restarted recently, and the server's not running on server3. Let's reconfigure the servers to allow more memory (using Bolt or by directly modifying config/service files) and restart them

wash bolt/webservers > bolt task run service -t webservers action=restart name=my-server
Started on server1...
Started on server2...
Started on server3...
Finished on server1:
  {
    "status": "MainPID=751,LoadState=loaded,ActiveState=active"
  }
Finished on server2:
  {
    "status": "MainPID=2927,LoadState=loaded,ActiveState=active"
  }
Finished on server3:
  {
    "status": "MainPID=21936,LoadState=loaded,ActiveState=active"
  }
Successful on 3 targets: server1,server2,server3
Ran on 3 targets in 1.91 sec

The Bolt plugin for Wash provides an accessible, interactive means of investigating multiple systems. Combined with Bolt inventory, it's natural to then take action with Bolt.

Currently supports Bolt v1 and v2 inventories, but not inventory plugins.

1. Install Wash

2. gem install boltwash

3. Get the path to the bolt.rb file with gem contents boltwash

   If you have multiple versions of boltwash installed, then you may need to do gem contents boltwash --version <version> to get the path. You can use gem list boltwash to see all installed versions of boltwash.

4. Add to ~/.puppetlabs/wash/wash.yaml

   external-plugins:
       - script: '/path/to/boltwash/bolt.rb'
   # Uncomment this to get the inventory from a Boltdir instead
   # of the default ~/.puppetlabs/bolt
   #bolt:
   #  dir: /path/to/boltdir

5. Start Wash with wash (or restart it if it's already running)

6. Enjoy!

If you're a developer, you can use the bolt plugin from source with bundle install and set script: /path/to/boltwash/bolt.

When sending complex commands over WinRM, you can pass the command as a single string with appropriate escaping, as in

wash bolt/win > wexec target 'Get-Process | Where StartTime -gt $([DateTime]::Today)'

• Bolt inventory plugins
• Implement the 'metadata' method to retrieve facts