Herd

Herd is an in-progress, easy-to-use framework for management of small-scale server clusters in pure python. Tools like puppet, chef, ansible seem to target more large-scale systems, and in my experience aren't great for getting some small, dead simple machines and apps going.

In addition, Herd aims to provide a simple framework for creating and handling your nodes across multiple cloud providers, to help limit and manage your server costs. :)

While in theory, Herd can do anything SSH can manage, it aims to provide one good strategy for everything, to eliminate complicated configs.

Getting started

• pip install herd

• Create a basic config file:

    [ssh]
    path = "/path/to/rsaprivatekey"
    password = 'rsa_key_passphrase'
  
    [providers.digitalocean]
    token = "MY_PRIVATE_TOKEN"
  
    [clusters.cluster_name]
    provider = 'digitalocean'
    server_count = 1
    max_monthly_cost = 5
    ssh_keys = ["RSA_KEY_FINGERPRINT"]
    region = 'sfo1'
    image = 'ubuntu-14-04-x64'
  

• herd up cluster_name --config path/to/config (default ./config.toml)

• herd info cluster_name

• herd install cluster_name git