Working with Non-Cloud Servers in Pallet

If have tried to configure local vm’s or non-virtualised servers in Pallet, you might well have given up. The recent 0.3 release has made working with existing servers much easier, however.

Pallet now has a node-list provider, which you can use to specify the tags and address of the machine that you want to manage.

    (require 'pallet.compute.node-list)
    (def service 
      (pallet.compute/compute-service
        "node-list"
         :node-list [(pallet.compute.node-list/make-node
                       "hostname" "tag" "192.168.2.23" :ubuntu)])
    

Use defnode and lift to configure the machines based on the tag.

    (require 'pallet.core)
    (pallet.core/defnode tag
      :configure (pallet.resource/phase
                   (pallet.resource.package/package "wget")))
    (pallet.core/lift tag)
    

Pallet has it’s roots in jclouds, and was originally meant to work directly with a cloud provisioning api. Adding the abitility to work with a fixed list of nodes was a simple case of wiring up a subset of pallet’s capabilities. The converge command has the capability of starting and stopping nodes, and is obviously not supported by node-list.