Bash Installer Framework

... is a simple bash-based installation framework for your daily tedious installation tasks.

Getting started

Not much to do here, simply copy over install.sh, config.sh and the utils directory to your project, modify the config.sh and start creating tasks.

Tasks

Installer tasks should reside in the tasks subdirectory and should be prefixed with a two-digit number (e.g., 00_check_system.sh), since they are read in and executed in alphanumeric order. Tasks have three states, NOT RUN, FAILED, and DONE. The state is saved persistently across installer runs.

Each task needs to define two functions, <taskname>_init and <taskname>_run, where <taskname> is everything between the two-digit prefix and the .sh file extension (e.g., check_system). The init needs to register the task with the installer framework by calling the task_setup function:

task_setup <taskname> <shortname> <description> [dependencies]

The run method should do the hard work and should return ${E_SUCCESS} on success, ${E_FAILURE} otherwise. If the task needs to save additional data persistently, it can do so by storing it in its own dictionary by calling dictSet <taskname> <key> <value>. For convenience, tasks may define getter functions for their data (see tasks/03_ganja_smoking.sh and tasks/04_his_highness.sh for example).

Here's a simple example of a task:

# File: 01_install_packages.sh

function install_packages_init() {
  task_setup "install_packages" "Install packages" "Install system packages" "check_system"
}

function install_packages_run() {
  log_info "Installing packages..."
  
  log_command apt-get install gcc
  if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    log_error "Failed to install packages."
    return ${E_FAILURE}
  fi

  return ${E_SUCCESS}
}

Utilities

The installer framework provides simple logging, UI, templating, and command line option utilities:

Logging

The logging utility lets the user log information to a logfile named install.sh.<date>.log. Logging knows six different severities, WARNING, INFO, IMPORTANT, ERROR, START, FINISH. The latter two are only used to denote when a task has been started and when it has finished, and they are only used by the framework itself (see run_task function in utils/05_tasks.sh). The other four may be used as desired by calling their corresponding log_<severity> functions. Each function takes at least a message as its first argument, and may be additionally passed arbitrary data which is printed as DEBUG information in the logfile.

By default, most of the logging output is printed to STDOUT as well, this may be adjusted using the LOG_STDOUT configuration variable in config.sh.

UI

Three simple UI functions exist to help the user retrieve information from the customer. Examples:

if ask "Are you sure?"; then
  ...
fi

username=$(enter_variable "Please enter your username.")
if [ -z ${username} ]; then
  # The user didn't enter anything! Error out.
fi

password=$(enter_hidden_variable "Please enter a password.")
...

Please note that the enter_variable and enter_hidden_variable calls now present a default prompt >> to the user, so there is no need to put : after your message. Additionally, enter_variable now takes an optional second default value parameter.

port=$(enter_variable "Please enter the port." "80")

Templating

As writing a configuraton file is a pretty common task for an installer, I implemented a simple templating engine, borrowing ideas from here and the syntax from ERuby. Call like this:

render_template "srcfile" "dstfile" "var1" "val1" "var2" "val2" ...

srcfile may look like this:

This is a templating source file with <%= var1 %> and <%= var 2 %>.

See tasks/05_come_down.sh for an example.

Command line options

To add a command line option to the install script, use one of the following functions:

add_command_line_option <name> <longopt> <shortopt> <description> <default>
add_command_line_switch <name> <longopt> <shortopt> <description>

A command line switch has a boolean value and always defaults to false. name, longopt, and shortopt may not contain spaces.

To retrieve the command line option's values, use something like either

local var=$(get_command_line_option <name>)

or

if has_command_line_switch? <name>; then
  ...

Semantic Versioning

You can extract parts from semantic version numbers (i.e., <major>.<minor>.<patch>) or compare semantic version numbers using the following functions:

local major=$(semver_major "1.2.3")

if semver_eq "1.2.3" "1.2.3"; then
  ...

YAML

You can read values from a YAML file using Ruby.

local val=$(yaml_get "database.yml" "production" "user")

License

The installer framework is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE file for details. The getopt implementation in utils/06_options.sh was written by Aron Griffis and is licensed under the GNU GPLv3. The semver comparison utilities in utils/07_semver.sh were written by folks at Cloudflare are BSD 2-clause-licensed, and have been heavily adapted, plus its support for SPECIAL suffixes has been removed.