Knife::Hosts, a plugin to generate host file records

Problem

We have a bunch of chef-managed servers that are physical machines hosted at Rackspace. Rackspace’s host naming scheme involves a 6-digit number preceeding the hostname, ie 123456-app1.foo.com. These names are hard to remember, and we don’t have public DNS records for all of our chef-controlled servers. We would prefer not to make public DNS records, but we also don’t want to have to knife ssh "name:123456-app1.foo.com" (after doing a knife show to find the actual node name).

Solution

I wrote a knife plugin that cleans up node names into their easy-to-remember components and prints names and IPs formatted for inclusion in a hosts file.

I added a couple of extra options to simplify hostnames automatically.

Since all (most) of the servers that I connect to are at the same domain foo.com, I drop the last two elements and add the remainder as an alias. So the output for a host named app1.foo.com with IP 10.0.0.1 would look like:

10.0.0.1 app1.foo.com app1

which I put into my hosts file, and now I can just ssh app1 to get to that server.

Also, I added an otion to remove the leading Rackspace identifying number. So the output for a host named 123456-app1.foo.com with IP 10.0.0.1 would look like:

10.0.0.1 123456-app1.foo.com app1.foo.com app1

And of course, because this is a knife plugin, you can generate output for all your chef-controlled hosts at once, or limit the output using a chef search query.

Getting It

The gem is available at rubygems.org as well as from GitHub.

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'knife-hosts'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself with:

$ gem install knife-hosts

Usage

knife hosts [-di] [QUERY]

Copy the output to your /etc/hosts Use an optional chef search query to limit the output.

We add friendly aliases a couple of ways:

1. We strip trailing domain elements (default 2) from the end of node names and add an alias:

10.1.1.1 foo.bar.com foo

You can override the number of domain elements stripped with the -d [N], --drop-elements [N] option, and disable it completely with -d 0

1. Rackspace prefaces the hostname of physical nodes with an identifying number, eg 000000-foo.bar.com We strip this number and add the leftover host name as an alias, eg:

10.1.1.1 000000-foo.bar.com foo.bar.com

If you happen to name your nodes with a leading number and then a hyphen, you may want to disable this behavior with -i, --ignore-strip-rackspace option.