Getting Started

The no-nonsense guide to getting started with Vaquero.

Installation

Vaquero is distributed as a ruby gem. Installation is as simple as:

$ gem install vaquero_io

Plugins

Vaquero requires a plugin to be installed in order to actually do anything. Right now, there’s only a single plugin in development, vaquero-plugin-vcoworkflow, but development is also underway for a straight vSphere plugin as well.

See the list of available plugins.

To install a plugin:

$ vaquero plugin install <URL>

For example:

$ vaquero plugin install https://github.com/vaquero-io/vaquero-plugin-vcoworkflow.git

Platform definition

Vaquero operates on the basis of a “Platform Definition”. This is a set of YAML files which outlines the overall structure of your application. If your’e starting from scratch, you can create a new one:

$ vaquero new -p vaquero-plugin-vcoworkflow

This will create a set of files:

.
├── infrastructure
│   └── compute.yml
└── platform.yml

The platform.yml file is where you outline the basic structure of your application.

platform:
  provider: vaquero-plugin-vcoworkflow
  plugin_version: 0.1.0
  product: myplatform
  environments:
    - qa1
    - stage1
    - prod1
  nodename:
    - environment
    - '-'
    - component
    - '-'
    - instance
  pools:
    defaultpool: &defaultpool
      vco_url: https://vco.example.com:8281
      workflow_name: 'Request Component'
      workflow_id:
      reservation_policy: nonprod
      execute_on_behalf_of: svc_accout@example.com
      compute: small
      count: 2
      run_list:
        - role[loc_uswest]
        - role[base]
      component_role:
        - role[#]
  components:
    webserver:
      <<: *defaultpool

Environments

Once the platform definition is written, you need to create environment definitions for each environment you need to provision (dev, stage, production). In the simplest form, you simply need to include the components of your platform which need to exist in the environment. You can also override parameters in the environment if they need to be different.

qa1:
  product: myplatform
  provider: vaquero-plugin-vcoworkflow
  plugin_version: 0.1.0
  environment: qa1
  pools:
    default: &default
      reservation_policy: nonprod
      compute: small
      count: 2
  components:
    webserver:
      <<: *default

Building

To build your platform, you do so an environment at a time:

$ vaquero build qa1

You can also build a single component of your stack

$ vaquero build qa1 --component webserver

Or even a single node

$ vaquero build qa1 --component webserver --node 2

Or several specific nodes in a larger cluster

$ vaquero build qa1 --component apiserver --node 2,5,8

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