godo, our first open source library written in golang

Time for some more OS goodness in these days at Namshi: this time we’ve been experimenting with Go and decided to release a small project we’ve built in the last couple of days.

The library, called godo (which literally means go and do) is trying to solve the problem of always doing repetitive tasks on remote servers (remote execution) without having to use more advanced tools like Fabric / Salt / etc.

Tired of “let me check what’s up Varnish on our frontend servers”? Enter godo.

With godo, you define a configuration file, put it in your home (on your local machine) and you can start invoking remote commands.

This is how your configuration file would look like:

servers:
  web1:
    address: "xxx.xxx.xx.xxx:22"
    user:    "me"
  web2:
    address: "xxx.xxx.xx.xxx:22"
    user:    "me"
  db:
    address: "xxx.xxx.xx.xxx:22"
    tunnel:  "tunnel.yourcompany.com:22"
    user:    "me"
groups:
  web: [web1, web2]
commands:
  uptime:
    target:       all
    exec:         "uptime"  
    description:  "Retrieves uptime info for all machines"  
  slow-queries:
    target: db
    exec: "mysql-log -n 10"
  nginx-logs:
    target: web
    exec: "sudo tail -10f /var/log/nginx/access.log"
hostfile: "/home/YOU/.ssh/known_hosts"
timeout: 2

and here’s a little GIF that is pretty self-explatory:

For more infos, please refer to the usage section of the readme.

A bit of background…

We’ve been starting to play around with Go since we believe it is a solid language for DevOps-ish things and is overall interesting and simple enough when you have to deal with stuff that needs to be running on different platforms — in fact, before godo we started hacking on go to write some small programs that run at our warehouse in Dubai, and run on windows :)

Of course, Go is very different from other players in our stack (ie. JavaScript and the good old PHP) and serves very different purposes, but seems like we will be experimenting much more in the next months.

Though, don’t worry, we <3 JavaScript and aren’t planning to leave it anytime soon ;–)