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:

1. Tasks without an explicit target
2. Tasks targeting <local> explicitly
3. Override the task’s target to <local>
4. Disable SSH per task with no_ssh task
5. Disable SSH globally with no_ssh
6. Running parts of a task within LOCAL{} blocks
7. Connect to local host over SSH

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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.

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(R)?ex is a configuration management framework written in Perl which can be used to simplify and automate various system administrator tasks from deployment management to data center automation. OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for embedded devices and it is widely used on different network equipment by replacing their original firmware. Soon you can combine the power of these two as OpenWrt support is coming into Rex!

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