Requires

A require allows user to specify values required to apply a state or to call a provide. Basically, a require is used to specify a tuple of values. These values are described by a list of armonic.variable.Variable.

Require describes parameter values and service dependencies

The configuration parameter of a service is often bound to the configuration parameter of a another services that the first one needs. A typical example is the database_name parameter of the Wordpress that has to be equal to the database_name parameter used to create the database by Mysql.

That means parameter values and dependencies can be handled together. Thus, we introduce armonic.require.RequireLocal and armonic.require.RequireExternal to describe service dependencies in Armonic.

Arity of parameters and dependencies

The parameter nargs of a require is used to specify how many times a require can be specified. For instance, a load balancer requires several backend where each backend consists of a host and port variable. The nargs parameters of the backend require of a load balancer can be set to ‘*’.

Require

Example with armonic.require.Require:

class ConfigureApache(State):

    @Require('ports', [VInt('http', default=80), VInt('https', default=443)])
    def set_ports(self, requires):
        print requires.ports.variables().http
        print requires.ports.variables().https

Note

When calling the set_ports provide you can define port values for http and https. If no values are provided default values are used.

RequireLocal

Example with armonic.require.RequireLocal:

class ConfigureWordpress(State):

    @RequireLocal("web_server", "//vhost",
                  provide_ret=[VString("directory", default="/var/www/wordpress")])
    def enter(self, requires):
        print requires.web_server.variables().directory

The local require describes the dependency between Wordpress and a web server such as Apache2. The second parameter is a xpath that will be specialized at runtime by the user. The default directory is suggested by Wordpress and could be used by Apache2 to configure a vhosts.

RequireExternal

class ConfigureWordpress(State):

    @RequireLocal("dbinfo", "//Mysql//add_database",
                  provide_ret=[VString("dbname"), VString("dbuser"), VString("dbpassword")])
    def enter(self, requires):
        print requires.dbinfos.variables().dbname
        print requires.dbinfos.variables().dbuser
        print requires.dbinfos.variables().dbpassword

Note

When entering the ConfigureWordpress state the add_database provide will be called on the same system and the result of this call is saved in the requires argument passed to the enter method. The provide to call is written with an xpath string.

armonic.require.RequireExternal has the same usage as armonic.require.RequireLocal. The only difference is that a host must be provided to armonic.require.RequireExternal.