NAME

       cdist-explorer - Explore the target systems

DESCRIPTION

       Explorer are small shell scripts, which will be executed on the target host. The aim of
       the explorer is to give hints to types on how to act on the target system. An explorer
       outputs the result to stdout, which is usually a one liner, but may be empty or multi line
       especially in the case of type explorers.

       There are general explorers, which are run in an early stage, and type explorers. Both
       work almost exactly the same way, with the difference that the values of the general
       explorers are stored in a general location and the type specific below the object.

       Explorers can reuse other explorers on the target system by calling
       $explorer/<explorer_name> (general and type explorer) or $type_explorer/<explorer name>
       (type explorer).

       In case of significant errors, the explorer may exit non-zero and return an error message
       on stderr, which will cause cdist to abort.

       You can also use stderr for debugging purposes while developing a new explorer.

EXAMPLES

       A very simple explorer may look like this:

           hostname

       Which is in practise the hostname explorer.

       A type explorer, which could check for the status of a package may look like this:

           if [ -f "$__object/parameter/name" ]; then
              name="$(cat "$__object/parameter/name")"
           else
              name="$__object_id"
           fi

           # Except dpkg failing, if package is not known / installed
           dpkg -s "$name" 2>/dev/null || exit 0

SEE ALSO

       •   cdist(1)

       •   cdist-reference(7)

       •   cdist-stages(7)

COPYING

       Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Nico Schottelius. Free use of this software is granted under the
       terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).

AUTHOR

       Nico Schottelius <nico-cdist--@--schottelius.org>
           Author.

                                            04/07/2016                          CDIST-EXPLORER(7)