magnet

MAGNET

Magnet is a tool which helps you to SSH to host(s). It gets list of hosts from your service discovery system(for example consul), builds dictionary of keywords and associates hostname/IP with keywords.
Magnet supports plugins. If you use custom service discovery system you can write your own plugin.

Why it might be useful?

1. No need to remember hostnames/IPs
2. If your app is installed on multiple hosts it opens all of them to save your time. You alway can use full hostname to ssh to specific host.
3. you don’t know on what host to ssh, but you probably know the app name, env, index or something. We assume that tags, labels, groups and so on are used because they are our keywords.

WHAT IS INSIDE?

• magnet.py - main interface
• console.sh - script which opens console of your preference (edit console.sh before first run)
• magnet.conf - defines what plugin to use and path to console.sh

Dependencies

python-pip3 - must be installed before executing python3 setup.py install
These packages will be installed by setup.py:

• python-qt4 - for GUI
• xdotool - for managing tabs in your terminal
• pyyaml

INSTALATION

• git clone https://github.com/pymag09/magnet.git
• sudo python3 setup.py install
• edit console.sh. There are number of settings at the very top of file.
  • console_tool - terminal of your preference
  • hot_key - xdotool emulates keys press. It’s shortcut for new tab. Default key combinations for konosle and gnome-terminal is Ctrl+Shift+t
  • run_this - ssh -l user or your ssh wrapper(in case you use jump host).
  • layout_list - US layout is used when we need to type and execute some command. If you have more than one layout in the end of execution we need to revert layouts you use. PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THIS VARIABLE. IT CAN OVERWRITE YOUR CURRENT SETTINGS.
• edit magnet.conf. Default path is ~/.magnet/. There are only two parameters.
  • plugin
  • cmd - path to console.sh script
• edit plugin config file. Default path is ~/.magnet/

OPTIONAL STEP

• create hot key for magnet.py. For example I use Ctrl+Alt+m.

STATIC INVENTORY

In case you don’t have everything in service discovery but want magnet to add these hosts to shared DB you can do this by adding records to static_inventory.yaml, section hosts. Format is simple:

"ip or DNS name":
  - any name
  - keyword1
  - keyword2

ALIASES

Another cool feature - aliases. Imagin in service discovery you have registered service - “cool.app”. But in your team, everybody call this app - fatboy. fatboy is unofficial name and for convenience you can assign local alias. Format:

aliases:
  fatboy: cool.app
  spaceship: cool.app
  ....

Terminal window

I tried different approaches, because the idea was to write single script for every possible terminal, but I end up with separate function for KDE konsole and everything else. xdotool has couple of downsides. All of them are related to keyboard layout. Needless to say konsole has perfect dbus support. Apparently this is the best choice for konsole. Hope this is finally version of console.sh

DEMO

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