Overview

Tacoscript is a command line tool for the automation of tasks, the management of the operating system and applications.
It can be installed as a single dependency-free binary. It doesn't require any scripting languages. Any Unix/Linux and Microsoft Windows are supported equally.

Tacoscript can manage host systems from simple yaml files written in a Salt Project inspired configuration language.

Why do we need another provisioning tool? All competitors like Puppet, Ansible, or Salt have limited support for Windows. And they require the installation of additional dependencies, which is not always convenient. Tacoscript is the first tool – written in Go – that is shipped as a static binary. A big variety of host OS and platforms, in a convenient way.

Tacoscript is declarative. You define how the system, a file or a software should look like after tacoscript has run. Before each run, Tacoscript compares the desired outcome with the current state. Only the missing steps are preformed.

Program execution

Prepare a script in the yaml format , e.g. tascoscript.yaml, then execute it.

tacoscript tascoscript.yaml

You can also output the execution details with -v flag:

tacoscript -v tascoscript.yaml

You can use any file extension. Using .taco for example is fine too.

Scripting

The script file uses the yaml format. The file consists of a list of tasks that define the states of the host system. The desired state can be an installed program or files with pre-defined content.

Here is the minimal possible tacoscript.yaml for Unix:

# unique id of the task, can be any string
create-file:
  #task type (function) to be executed
  cmd.run:
    #Paramter, command to run
    - name: touch /tmp/somefile.txt

On Windows, the file can be:

create-file:
  cmd.run:
    - name: New-Item -ItemType file C:\Users\Public\Documents\somefile.txt
    - shell: powershell

We can read the script as:

Inside a script, we have a task with the id create-file. It consists of the function cmd.run which executes touch /tmp/somefile.txt or its PowerShell equivalent. The desired result of this script execution would be an empty file at /tmp/somefile.txt.

Scripts

The tacoscript.yaml file contains a collection of tasks. Each task defines a desired state of the host system. You can add as many tasks as you want. The tacoscript binary will execute tasks from the file sequentially.

Tasks

Each script contains a collection of tasks. Each task has a unique id, and a function that identifies the kind of operation the task can do. Tasks get a list of parameters under it as input data. In the example above, the function cmd.run receives the parameter -name with value /tmp/somefile.txt and interprets it as a command which should be executed.

Supported functions aka task types

• cmd.run Run shell commands and scripts Read more
• file.managed copy, manipulate, download and manage files Read More
• file.replace remove packages via package manager Read More
• pkg.installed install packages via package manager Read More
• pkg.uptodate update packages via package manager Read More
• pkg.removed remove packages via package manager Read More
• win_reg.present remove packages via package manager Read More
• win_reg.absent remove packages via package manager Read More
• win_reg.absent_key remove packages via package manager Read More
• realvnc_server.config_update remove packages via package manager Read More

[Read full documentation]

Templates

See Templates rendering

Known limitations

• to use shell pipes, redirects or glob expands, please specify a shell parameter
• user parameter will require sudo rights for tacoscript, in Windows this parameter is ignored
• if you use cmd.run tasks in Windows, you'd better specify the shell parameter as cmd.exe, otherwise you will get errors like: exec: "xxx": executable file not found in %PATH%
• the order of the scripts is not guaranteed. If you don't use the require values, the scripts will be executed in any order.

Development instructions

Unit-tests

You can run unit-tests as:

make test

Static Code Analyses

Execute static code analytic tools

1. Install golangci-lint using instructions from this site

2. Run the tool using make sca

Compile tacoscript binary for your host OS

1. Compile tacoscript binary for Unix with make build.
2. Compile tacoscript binary for Windows with make build-win