Box is full of boxes

I just know I have a Debian box somewhere…

Do you have more than π boxes? Are you constantly forgetting about them?

With Box you can easily:

• Keep inventory of your boxes:

  $ box ls
  me@foo.bar.com
  i@bar.baz.net
  myself@quux.org

• Check if they're up:

  $ box uptime
  me@foo.bar.com | 15:29:49 up 24 days, 3:07, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
  i@bar.baz.net | 3:29PM up 17 days, 3:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.20, 0.14, 0.09
  myself@quux.org | 3:29PM up 42 days, 1:44, 15 users, load averages: 1.30, 1.94, 1.88

• Remind yourself what you put in those boxes:

  $ box id
  me@foo.bar.com | Linux foo 3.5.0-17-generic i686
  i@bar.baz.net | NetBSD bar 6.0.1 amd64
  myself@quux.org | Linux quux 2.6.34-generic amd64

All this and more, for the low price of nothing! Get Box today!

Overview

Box is a remote command execution program. Box allows you to run commands on all of your servers and presents the produced results in a readable format.

Box is liberally licensed with the ISC license.

In the future, Box will likely morph into a minimal configuration management system.

Who Box is for

Box is designed for managing at most twentyish boxes. If you have a larger deployment, we recommend that you use tools like Ansible, Salt Stack, Chef or Puppet (in roughly increasing order of complexity).

Requirements

• A POSIX /bin/sh implementation on boxes and on the controlling machine.
• Access to boxes with an SSH key.
• Box runs commands in parallel on each box if GNU Parallel is installed.

Getting started

Box doesn't have a an installation method yet. You can run it easily from a Git clone, though:

git clone git@github.com:wolverian/box.git
cd box
echo user1@host1.com >> etc/hosts
echo user2@host2.com >> etc/hosts
PATH=bin:$PATH
box tasks
…
box id
…

Troubleshooting

I can't enter my server password

Box requires that you use SSH keys for authentication.