Zap

A simple cross-platform orchestration and configuration management tool.

The main goal for Zap is to a simple mechanism for managing groups of computers with varying configurations and needs. Zap accomplishes this with "tasks" which can be composed into "plans" or run standalone. These tasks can be collections of scripts or a statically linked binaries, which will be pushed to the target machine(s) and executed.

Zap borrows ideas from Puppet Bolt. but leaves some of the Puppet-based legacy from Bolt behind.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Command Line
  • cmd
  • check
  • plan
  • task
• Examples
  • Task
  • Plan
• Built-in Tasks
  • sh

Getting Started

Zap is still very early in its development, but if you would like to give it a try you can install it via Rust’s cargo command: cargo install zap-cli.

cargo install zap-cli
mkdir my-zap-project
cd my-zap-project
wget https://github.com/rtyler/zap/archive/v0.1.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf v0.1.1.tar.gz zap-0.1.1/tasks -C tasks --strip=1
cat > hello.zplan <<EOF
task 'tasks/echo.ztask' {
    msg = 'Show them my medal Kif'
}
EOF

You will also need to create an inventory file.

Example inventory.yml

groups: []
targets:
  - name: alpha
    uri: 192.168.1.1
    config:
      ssh:
        user: root
        password: root

config:
  transport: ssh

Once this has been set up, you can run:

zap plan hello.zplan -t alpha --dry-run

Command Line

The zap command line interface has a number of subcommands that can help with the development and deployment of tasks and plans.

cmd

check

plan

task

Examples

❯ zap task tasks/echo.ztask -p msg="Hello World" -t zap-freebsd
Running task with: TaskOpts { task: "tasks/echo.ztask", parameter: ["msg=Hello World"], targets: "zap-freebsd" }
Hello World

❯ zap plan ./examples/basic.zplan -t zap-freebsd
Running plan with: PlanOpts { plan: "./examples/basic.zplan", targets: "zap-freebsd" }
Hello from the wonderful world of zplans!
This is nice

Task

A task is a simple container of some form of execution. Typically this will be a wrapped shell/ruby/python script which does some specific piece of functionality. Tasks may also take parameters, which allow for some pluggability of new values.

Tasks have some default parameters that should not be overridden in new task definitions.

Table 1. Built-in Parameters

Parameter	Description
provides	A relative or absolute path to a file that the task provides. If the file exists, then the task will be skipped.
unless	A script snippet which can determine whether the task should execute. A non-zero exit status causes the task to execute.

echo.ztask

task Echo {
    parameters {
        msg {
            required = true
            help = 'String to echo back to the client'
            type = string
        }
    }

    script {
        inline = 'echo {{msg}}'
    }
}

Plan

A plan is a collection of tasks which can be applied to a target or targets. Tasks are referenced with the parameters that should be passed into them, and will be executed in the order that they are defined.

simple.zplan

task 'tasks/echo' {
    msg = 'Hello from the wonderful world of zplans!'
}

task 'tasks/echo' {
    msg = 'This is nice'
}

Built-in Tasks

Zap comes with a number of tasks that are built into zap itself. These can be referenced in the task declarations in plans via the zap:// URL.

sh

The sh task will execute the given script via /bin/sh on the target.

Example

task 'zap://sh' {
    script = '''
        pwd
        echo ${SHELL}
    '''
}

Table 2. Parameter

Name	Required	Description
script	yes	A shell script
provides	no	When this file is present indicates that the script should not be re-run
unless	no	When this script returns zero exit status, the script should not be re-run