Sitecreator

I’ve just spent a few days using up spare holiday, which means I’ve been making things for work that work doesn’t want but I do. This time it’s sitecreator, a tool for configuring websites and all their dependencies (Unix users, databases, ssh keys, DNS records etc.) on servers.

Since there’s so many possible things for the site to rely upon, and I’m not *that* fond of reinventing the wheel, all it really does is generate passwords and call scripts. There’s a configuration file that tells it how many passwords to generate, how to work out what the username should be and perhaps to generate a couple of other things (like database names) if needed. Another bit of the config then explains which scripts to call and with which arguments (including these recently-generated passwords and usernames), and at the end it tells you what it thinks it did. I’ve written a few scripts for it already (mirroring what I want to do with it).

For example, here‘s a relatively simple config file with some explanation of what’s going on, and some output with that configuration:

avi@amazing:~$ sitecreator example.com
MySQL:
        username: example
        password: gN?@c6$Y7}Y{yg
        database: example

SSH:
        username: example
        password: r;x6kEgO!

MySQL dev:
        username: example_dev
        password: vA!)9WIMo&by}'
        database: example

avi@amazing:~$

And there’s at least another example config file in etc/config/. Anyway, hopefully this’ll be useful to somebody else who isn’t quite into automation enough to have already done this (or to have started using puppet or similar), but does have enough users or systems to configure that some automation would be good.

Oh, it’s not very tested yet, and I’ve still not come up with a sane thing to do with the output from the scripts :)