Introduction

A deploy is a collection of several components:

• Inventories. Collections of hosts, against which your scripts run. Either defined by a file, or by specifying a single hostname like [e-mail] for ad-hoc runs.

• Hosts. Host definitions allow you to assign variables and groups to specific hosts.

• Groups. Hosts inherit the variables defined by the groups they belong to. All hosts implicitly belong to the all group, which can be used to define global variables.

• Scripts. Regular python scripts specifying what should be done on the remote hosts.

Fora always requires an inventory and a script to run. Here is an example using each of the above components:

inventory.py

# A list of your hosts.
hosts = [ dict(url="ssh://myhost.com", groups=["web"]) ]

groups/web.py

hosts/myhost.py

deploy.py

Deploy structure

The general deploy structure is very flexible. There are only two things to keep in mind:

• The working directory of a script is always its containing folder, so relative paths will work as expected. There is no definite root directory for a deploy.

• Host and group definitions are always expected to be in the hosts/ and groups/ folders relative to the inventory file.

We recommend one of the following layouts for larger scale infrastructure management:

minimal

While a single deploy.py would be truly minimal, this is a reasonable starting point to extend from.

./
├─ hosts/           # Host specific configuration
│  └─ localhost.py
├─ inventory.py     # A list of all managed hosts
└─ deploy.py        # The main deploy script

flat

dotfiles

modular

staging_prod

You can use fora --init <layout> in an empty directory to initialize it with a specific deploy structure. See the included Examples to see how different layouts may be used.