DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

REX(1)                User Contributed Perl Documentation               REX(1)

NAME
       (R)?ex - (Remote)? Execution

DESCRIPTION
       Rex is a tool to ease the execution of commands on multiple remote
       servers. You can define small tasks, chain tasks to batches, link them
       with servers or server groups, and execute them easily in your
       terminal.

   Command line options
       -b              Run batch
       -e              Run the give code fragment
       -E              Execute task on the given environment
       -H              Execute task on these hosts
       -z              Execute task on hosts from this command's output
       -G|-g           Execute task on these group
       -u              Username for the ssh connection
       -p              Password for the ssh connection
       -P              Private Keyfile for the ssh connection
       -K              Public Keyfile for the ssh connection
       -T              List all known tasks.
       -Tm             List all known tasks in "machine readable" format
       -Ty             List all known tasks in YAML format
       -Tv             List all known tasks with all information
       -f              Use this file instead of Rexfile
       -h              Display this help
       -m              Monochrome output. No colors
       -M              Load Module instead of Rexfile
       -s              Use sudo for every command
       -S              Password for sudo
       -v              Display (R)?ex Version
       -F              Force. Don't regard lock file
       -d              Debug
       -dd             More Debug (includes Profiling Output)
       -o <module>     Create a compatible output for the given module
       -C              Turn cache OFF
       -c              Turn cache ON
       -q              Quiet mode. No Logging output
       -qw             Quiet mode. Only output warnings and errors
       -Q              Really quiet. Output nothing.
       -t              Number of threads to use ('parallelism' parameter)

   Rexfile
       If you run rex it will read the file Rexfile in the current working
       directory. A Rexfile consists of 3 major parts.

       Authentication and Configuration

       In that part you define the user and password you want to use to log
       into your servers. You can even define timeouts or the paralellism of
       task execution.

       Simple Authentication

       Define the user

        user "<user>";

       Define the password

        password "<password>";

       Set password authentication

        pass_auth;

       Key Authentication

       Define Private Key

        private_key "/path/to/your/private/key.file";

       Define Public Key

        public_key "/path/to/your/public/key.file";

       Define Logging

       Log to a file

        logging to_file => "rex.log";

       Log to syslog

        logging to_syslog => "local0";

       Other Configuration parameters

       Define ssh timeout

        timeout 10;

       Define parallelism

        parallelism 2;

       Group your servers

       Rex gives you the possibility to group your servers. One way is to do
       it in code within the Rexfile. Another is to use a server.ini file in
       the same directory as the Rexfile.

       Code in the Rexfile

       Rex gives you the possibility to group your servers. So you don't need
       to type every servername multiple times.

        group "frontends" => "frontend01", "frontend02", "frontend03", "frontend04";

       You can even define ranges in the servernames:

        group "frontends" => "frontend[01..04]";

       Using server.ini

       The same group definition can be stored in a server.ini file:

        [frontends]
        frontend[01..04]

       Your tasks

       Create a task description

        desc "This is a long description of a task";

       Create the task

        task "shortname", group => "frontends", sub {
            run "uptime";
        };

       or, if you don't have groups

        task "shortname", "frontend01", "frontend02", "frontend03", "frontend04", sub {
            run "uptime";
        };

       and with serverranges

        task "shortname", "frontend[01..04]", sub {
            run "uptime";
        };

perl v5.20.2                      2015-09-04                            REX(1)