coreos / coreos/ignition

Suggestion: add sugar for systemd-confext

Open
#2,278 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

butane jira
Dominant language
Go
Stars
974
Forks
296
Avg merge
6d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

Description

Created originally in Butane by @jbtrystram: https://github.com/coreos/butane/issues/700


Systemd-confext bring a nice way to do out of band configuration management.
In it's simplest form, it's a directory under var/lib/confexts/<confext-name>. All content under that is overlayed on top of /etc.

One of the quirks is that it makes /etc read-only, but this is not a concern for ignition, since systemd-confext isn't active yet in the initramfs.

I think it would be nice to support fetching confexts fron a few sources, like HTTP and GIT, e.g. :

confext:
  name: quadlets
  source: https://github.com/user/repo
  enabled: true

This provide a nice way to update nodes day 2, but in a more declarative way. Because re-spin a whole FCOS node to add a new quadlet file through ignition can feel a bit overkill, especially on bare-metal.

see https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/2108
And https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/systemd-confext.8.html

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the linked Butane issue #700, the Fedora CoreOS tracker issue #2108, and the systemd-confext manual page to understand the desired configuration model and source behavior. Define the supported HTTP and Git source semantics, including the example name and enabled fields, so that declarative confext deployment is complete and unambiguous.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
git, go, linux
Domain
devops, operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.