CLI scripts on the server
Lukas Krejci
lkrejci at redhat.com
Thu Jan 6 12:38:51 UTC 2011
Hi all,
I'm writing this to turn your attention to a new feature that is (hopefully)
going to appear in RHQ 4 and that I think can have a large potential for
further improvements in the future (or maybe even in scope of RHQ 4).
The feature is described in the BZ
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667290 and is about adding the
ability to execute a CLI script on the server side as a reaction on an alert
(i.e. this is going to become a new alert plugin).
But thinking about this some more, I think that this could become a way of
providing custom functionality to the RHQ server UI by the users themselves.
Actually, this is something me and Filip talked about at the time the CLI
concept was being developed but we never got round to even formulate the ideas
and bring them forward to the team. I'm sure most of us have had similar ideas
but the backlog of the tasks was just too big for them to bubble up to the
attention :)
Obviously, we'd need to flesh out the security implications but at the same
time I don't think there's much more to decide security wise than what user
will the script run as and whether the CLI will have only access to remote
interfaces even if running on the server or if we are going to let it use the
full local interface.
Anyways, having the ability to run custom CLI directly on the server would
enable us to do things like:
1) execute CLI script as an alert notification (huh? ;) ) - what user would
this script run as?
2) Have CLI UI - a commandline interface in the browser for people that don't
click
3) Let the user create their own custom scripts and expose them somewhere in
the UI as single click actions. These could be global or maybe even per
resource/group, where the resource/group object could be injected in the scope
of the script automatically.
4) ...
Wrt. 3), to an extent we kind of did something like that already with the GWT
user interface I guess. But I don't know GWT enough to guess whether there is
even a remote chance of writing a "user-friendly" API that would interface
with our GWT services and if there is a possibility to later execute such
scripts client-side using something like eval("The user wrote this script;");
What are your thoughts? What aspects of the server should be scriptable?
Cheers,
Lukas
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