Doplr

The infrastructure discovery toolkit

Doplr is written in ES6, and as such requires a very up-to-date release of Node - Ensure you have the latest release at https://iojs.org

To use the CLI tool:

sudo npm install -g doplr

To use the library:

npm install --save doplr

Composed of several utilities: sweep for discovery, forecast for visualization and radar - an HTTP API for queuing sweeps and accessing the forecast data as well as a graphical look at the forecast.

Doplr is built on top of floom, the streaming infrastructure build system. Doplr and floom aim to go hand in hand in tackling Javascript's final frontier - it has conquered the browser and the server - now it's time to take on infrastructure and operations.

The Forecast

Information Doplr discovers is added to the forecast. A forecast is what Doplr calls the information it has collected so far. Running Doplr sweep will automatically create a .forecast directory, and all subsequent sweeps in that directory or any subdirectory will append to that forecast. It is generally assumed you'd use distinct directories for distinct infrastructures (think git repositories). Like git, Doplr will search up the directory chain for a .forecast (exactly like git's behavior).

Sweep

Sweep is Doplr's discovery action. It is able to discover hosts, networks, and most importantly, cloud provider APIs. Doplr's sweeps are powered by floom, both for discovering hosts via a cloud providers API, as well as probing hosts themselves via SSH or floom's fireball daemon.

doplr sweep host myserver.com

Assuming you can SSH to myserver.com, Doplr will add that host to the "forecast". Even if you can't, doplr will collect information based on the plugins configured.

Doplr can also sweep entire cloud providers, doing all the hard work for you!

doplr sweep aws AWS_SECRET_ID AWS_SECRET_KEY

We aim to support sweeping AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and OpenStack.

To sweep the entire forecast (all known elements in the infrastructure):

doplr sweep

Note that sweeps can take a long time. Consider using a dedicated Doplr Radar server!

Forecast

doplr forecast

Doplr will report on its findings and give a summary of the state of the infrastructure as currently reported in the forecast file. Note that this action does not do a sweep! It simply generates reports from the current .forecast. Doplr forecast can be run in verbose mode: doplr forecast -v or you can specifically ask about a particular host or device: doplr forecast myserver.com.

Radar

doplr radar

Radar provides the ability to background and schedule sweeps via an HTTP interface. It also has a pretty web interface which you can access at http://localhost:9040 by default.

You can also target a remote radar service with the --radar flag on any other operation. For example:

doplr sweep --radar=radar.mystartup.com

Library

npm install doplr

Now you can create your own Radar service, among other things:

const LibDoplr = require("doplr");
const doplr = new LibDoplr();
const radar = new doplr.Radar();
radar.listen(9040);

WeatherGirl

WeatherGirl is a pretty web interface which can browse the forecast and schedule and run sweeps. Doplr's Radar will host it for you automatically. The goal of this interface is to expose all major features of the doplr suite via a slick web UI.

Security

By default Doplr will simply use the current user to attempt to log into systems. Obviously, this is not typically desired or secure, particularly for a Radar server. There are two ways to accomplish this task: Bootstrap a dedicated SSH user, or install a Doplr agent on the remote systems.

doplr sweep host [email protected] -i somekey.pem

Doplr makes this easy to bootstrap:

ssh-keygen ...
doplr sweep ec2 --install-doplr-user -i ~/doplr.pem