Local management with Rex

Automation challenges often focus on remote endpoints, while several use cases require automating locally as well. Typical situations range from managing a personal machine, through setups where the managed fleet includes the host managing the whole, to pull-style models where each node manages itself.

Rex, the friendly automation framework supports any combination of local and remote execution. This post summarizes the main orientation points about local management.

TL;DR

Rex provides several options for local management to choose from, allowing authors to express their intent explicitly according to their use case at hand:

Releasing Rex-1.14.3

I released Rex-1.14.3 today, making it available both on CPAN and in my Gentoo overlay.

This version of the friendly automation framework contains bug fixes for local package installation, command existence checks, and git tests.

Gentoo GURU now includes Laminar

Laminar describes itself as a fast, lightweight, and modular Continuous Integration service for Linux. The official Gentoo GURU overlay now makes the latest 1.3 release available for the wider community.

Gentoo GURU now includes Vale

Vale describes itself as a “syntax-aware linter for prose built with speed and extensibility in mind”. The official Gentoo GURU overlay now makes the v2.27.0 release available for the wider community.

Gentoo has xsel-1.2.1 among the firsts

xsel works great to “manipulate the X selection”. Last week I stepped up as proxied maintainer to help bring already merged improvements to Gentoo users despite lack of new releases since 2008.

Thanks to support from soap during the past week, upstream has merged all ebuild patches, tagged 1.2.1, and Gentoo already ships the latest version — among the first distros, according to repology.