Foreman Tasks

Tasks management engine for Foreman. Gives you and overview of what's happening/happened in your Foreman instance.

Installation

Put the following to your Foreman's bundle.d/Gemfile.local.rb:

gem 'dynflow',       :git => 'https://github.com/Dynflow/dynflow.git'
gem 'foreman-tasks', :git => 'https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-tasks.git'

Run:

bundle install
rake db:migrate

Usage

In the UI, go to /foreman_tasks/tasks. This should give a list of tasks that were run in the system. It's possible to filter that using scoped search. Possible searches:

# search all tasks by user
owner.login = admin
# search all tasks on architecture with id 9
resource_type = Architecture and resource_id = 9

Clicking on the action, it should provide more details.

Via API:

curl -k -u admin:changeme\
  https://foreman.example.com/foreman_tasks/api/tasks/b346db45-76fd-4217-9247-aac51b5cde4e -H 'Accept: application/json'

Features

• Current tasks progress
• Audit: tasks history for resources and users
• Possibility to generate CLI examples
• Locking: connection between task and resource: allows listing tasks for a resource but also allows preventing to run two conflicting tasks on one resource.
• Dynflow integration allowing async processing, workflows definitions etc.

Dynflow Integration

This engine is agnostic on background processing tool and can be used with anything that allows supports some kind of execution hooks.

On the other side, since we started this as part of Katello integration with Dynflow, the dynflow adapters are already there.

Also, since dynflow has no additional dependencies in terms of another database (tested mainly on Postgres), this gem ships the Dynflow setting so that Dynflow can be used directly.

It's turned off by default, but you can turn that on with putting this code somewhere in Rails initialization process. In case of an engine, it would be:

initializer "your_engine.require_dynflow", :before => "foreman_tasks.initialize_dynflow" do |app|
  ForemanTasks.dynflow.require!
end

Additionally, there are also examples of using Dynflow for async tasks and auditing included in this repository. To enable them you just need to set FOREMAN_TASKS_MONKEYS env variable to true

FOREMAN_TASKS_MONKEYS=true bundle exec rails s

The example for async tasks handling is the puppet facts import. Next time puppet imports the facts to Foreman, the task should appear in the tasks list.

The example for auditing features is the architecture model. On every modification, there is a corresponding Dynflow action triggered. This leads to it appearing in the tasks list as well, even there was no async processing involved, but still using the same interface to show the task.

The Dynflow console is accessible on /foreman_tasks/dynflow path.

Production mode

In development mode, the Dynflow executor is part of the web server process. However, in production, it's more than suitable to have the web server process separated from the async executor. Therefore, Dynflow is set to use external process in production mode by default (can be changed with ForemanTasks.dynflow.config.remote = false).

The executor process needs to be executed before the web server. You can run it by:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake foreman_tasks:dynflow:executor

Also, there is a possibility to run the executor in daemonized mode using the dynflow-executor. It expects to be executed from Foreman rails root directory. See -h for more details and options

Issues

The issues are tracked here

Documentation

TBD - dig into the code for now (happy hacking:)

Tests

TBD

License

GPLv3

Author

Ivan Nečas