technogeekyPUPPY
This is an experimental Ruby module designed to provide a single format for specifying information often needed in Puppet. The hope is to provide a reasonable, regular-expression based specification for the following:
- P : rotocols
- U : RLs and URIs
- P : orts
- P : aths
- Y : AML, because I haven't yet thought of something more appropriate.
A standard URL might look like this (taken from URI Scheme):
foo://username:password@example.com:8042/over/there/index.dtb?type=animal&name=narwhal#nose
\_/ \_______________/ \_________/ \__/ \___/ \_/ \______________________/ \__/
| | | | | | | |
| userinfo hostname port | | query fragment
| \________________________________/\_____________|____|/
scheme | | | |
| authority path | |
| | |
| path interpretable as filename
| ___________|____________ |
/ \ / \ |
urn:example:animal:ferret:nose interpretable as extension
The primary changes for this specification from this example are:
- genuine protocols as schemes (tcp, udp, icmp)
- port ranges instead of ports
- support for netmasks (how?)
Examples
These are what I had in mind. The goal is to specify things once, and then pick apart their specification in order to understand what changes must be made in order to accomidate some provider.
Protocols
The point here is to specify that some module will be interested in some protocol.
- tcp://
- udp://
- tcp:
- udp:
- tcp://:http
- tcp://:https
- icmp:
URIs
There is already existing support for URIs in virtually every language, so I don't intend to do much more than fall through here.
- http://github.com
- http://github.com:80
- https://github.com/technogeeky/puppy
- //index.html
- http://8.8.8.8
- https://[fe80::0000:0000:0000:0000]:433
Ports
First, instead of specifying ports as bare numbers, specify them with a "sigil" of sorts:
- ://:
This sigil is really a blanking of the standard URI:
- (no scheme)://(no host):(port)
But one would often like to specify more about ports. Usually this is done with a data structure (tuples, lists, sets of variables, hashes, etc). For instance, in puppet, one might use two variables:
- $protocol = 'tcp'
- $port = 80
These two datum are not unrelated, however. If you just have $port, you may be talking about UDP. In order to be able to specify everything one is interested in in one pass, how about:
- $pup = 'tcp://:80'
- $pup = 'tcp://:http'
Then, anyone reading the variable $pup is forced to consider everything you have specified. We may also wish to specify that we're providing more than one port:
- $pup = 'tcp://:80,443'
- $pup = 'tcp://:http,https'
We may even want to specify a range of ports, for example, for a mongrel configuration:
- $mongrel::pup = 'tcp://:58480-58490'
Or for an irc server:
- $irc::pup = 'tcp://:6660,6666,66667,6669'
We may even wish to specify the entire list of possible ports, for sanity checking:
- tcp://:1-65565
Furthermore, for things like LISTEN directives on servers, we may wish to specify the host after all:
Mongrel Default:
- tcp://127.0.0.1:https
Passenger Default:
- tcp://0.0.0.0:https
Paths
Another area of annoyance is the handling of paths. One way to approach this is to simply use the existing standard for the 'file://' scheme:
- file:///etc/puppet/puppet.conf
Or to make the above implicit:
- ///etc/puppet/puppet.conf
Here, the '///' means with an implicit protocol-less host-less specification. That is, /// says: on the default protocol, on the default host, the absolute path /.
Puppet already uses a similar type of URL:
- puppet:///modules
Yaml
- How does this factor in?