cdist

cdist is an open source, free, portable and usable configuration management system for the UNIX/Linux operating systems. It is built after the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) principle as a replacement to some known configuration management systems, such as Chef, CFEngine, Puppet, and Bcfg2.

Your default configuration management system

cdist can be easily used in both enterprise-grade and small environments as the default configuration management system. Besides Linux, cdist also supports BSD flavors and Mac OS X operating systems. You should use cdist because it uses a push based configuration model via shell script, it doesn’t depend on anything, and it’s highly scalable.

Getting started with cdist

Configuring and installing cdist on your GNU/Linux operating system is quite easy, as you will be required to first grab the latest stable version of the software from Softoware, save it on a location of your choice, extract the archive and open a terminal emulator.

Use the ‘cd’ command in the terminal emulator window to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files, then type the “python setup.py install” command, without quotes, as root or with sudo in front of it to install the program system wide and make it available to all users.

To use it, type the ‘cdist’ command in the Linux terminal of your choice, as well as the ‘cdist --help’ or ‘cdist -h’ commands to view the default command-line options of the program.

Under the hood, availability and supported OSes

The cdist software is written entirely in the Python programming language and it’s fully compatible with all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as with various BSD flavors and the Mac OS X operating system. It has been successfully tested with both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures. Python 3.2.x or later is required for using the latest version of cdist.

What is new in this release:

• The generated PreOS is now cleaned of archives.
• The 4.0 branch was merged with 3.0.9.

What is new in version 3.0.8:

• This version introduces unit tests for dry run and the dependency builder, and enhances verification of the object id.

What is new in version 3.0.7:

• This version introduces a new beta feature that creates dependencies based on the execution order.

What is new in version 3.0.5:

• This version introduces the override concept and updates the documentation.

What is new in version 3.0.4:

• This version updates the documentation, backports install support from the 4.x branch, and updates types for Debian and FreeBSD.

What is new in version 3.0.3:

• This version includes cleanups for several types, introduces the new type __hostname, and changes the hostname global explorer.

What is new in version 4.0.0 Pre1:

• This version includes the new features install and preos as a preview.

What is new in version 3.0.2:

• This version adds the types __mount and __block, includes bugfixes for __cron and __ssh_authorized_keys, and documents all messages sent by types.