Configuration Management

Rex – friendly automation framework

Rex (Remote execution) is billed as the friendly automation framework.

It’s friendly to any combinations of local and remote execution, push and pull style of management, or imperative and declarative approach. Instead of forcing any specific model on you, it trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.

Rex provides a simple DSL that is completely syntax-compatible with Perl. You can use it without any Perl experience, but you can easily learn just enough Perl for Rex.

The starting point of every Rex project is the so-called Rexfile. You can think of this file like a Makefile. You can define your inventory, environments, authentication info and tasks in this file, among many other things.

This is free and open source software.

Features of the Rex DSL:

  • Capable to use two different SSH implementations under the hood: Net::SSH2 which is default on Windows, and the combination of Net::OpenSSH and Net::SFTP::Foreign on other platforms.
  • Powerful way to group your servers. The simplest way to use groups is to just define a group name and add all your desired servers to this group. Rex offers also a simple notation to define server ranges.
  • With environments it is easy to group your servers depending on the maturity of your configuration or your code. You can create environments for dev, staging and production machines. There is no limit for environments, so you can create as much as you need.
  • Use templates.

Website: www.rexify.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Rex team
License: Apache 2.0 License

Rex is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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