Fabricator

Fabricator is a hackable DevOps platform, similar to PowerShell Desired State Configuration in concept (to say, PowerShell team weren't the first ones to invent the concept, but have chosen the most descriptive name), and to Propellor in implementation.

Core Concept

With Fabricator, the user describes the desired state of their cluster, and Fabricator does its best to lead the cluster to this desired state, when asked to do so.

Fabricator "script" is an ordinary .NET project, where you may use all your favorite refactoring and code inspection tools; you may wrap or augment Fabricator calls with your code if you want to.

Fabricator offers a DSL and a set of tasks to configure the cluster, everything is available via NuGet and easily extendable.

Also, Fabricator is portable across the platforms supported by .NET: both the control machine and any of the nodes across the cluster may run any supported operating systems.

Detailed Workflow

Whenever the user wants to apply their changes to the cluster, they may, for each device:

• run the Fabricator-created binary locally on that device (via dotnet run, if .NET SDK is installed, or via other means)
• upload the host-specific Fabricator-created package to a remote host and run there, providing the runtime for it (if required)
• make Fabricator to upload the binary (essentially cloning itself to a remote host) and run via the runtime already existing on the host

Usually, .NET SDK should only be available locally, and shouldn't be necessary on remote.

When Fabricator is started on a remote host, it should be able to identify the host and required actions. It could do that either by passing command-line argument to itself, or by reading the hostname (if available).

Developer Documentation

Prerequisites

Fabricator requires .NET 5 (or later) SDK for development.

Build

To build the project (while automatically restoring the dependencies, if necessary), execute the following command:

$ dotnet build

Test

To run the automatic test suite, execute the following command:

$ dotnet test

Pack

To pack the artifacts for uploading onto NuGet, execute the following command:

$ dotnet pack