NAME

       cdist-stages - Stages used during configuration deployment

DESCRIPTION

       Starting the execution of deployment with cdist, cdist passes through different stages.

STAGE 1: TARGET INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

       In this stage information is collected about the target host using so called explorers.
       Every existing explorer is run on the target and the output of all explorers are copied
       back into the local cache. The results can be used by manifests and types.

STAGE 2: RUN THE INITIAL MANIFEST

       The initial manifest, which should be used for mappings of hosts to types, is executed.
       This stage creates objects in a cconfig database that contains the objects as defined in
       the manifest for the specific host. In this stage, no conflicts may occur, i.e. no object
       of the same type with the same id may be created, if it has different parameters.

STAGE 3: OBJECT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

       Every object is checked whether its type has explorers and if so, these are executed on
       the target host. The results are transferred back and can be used in the following stages
       to decide what changes need to be made on the target to implement the desired state.

STAGE 4: RUN THE OBJECT MANIFEST

       Every object is checked whether its type has a executable manifest. The manifest script
       may generate and change the created objects. In other words, one type can reuse other
       types.

       For instance the object apache/www.example.org is of type apache, which may contain a
       manifest script, which creates new objects of type __file.

       The newly created objects are merged back into the existing tree. No conflicts may occur
       during the merge. A conflict would mean that two different objects try to create the same
       object, which indicates a broken configuration.

STAGE 5: CODE GENERATION

       In this stage for every created object its type is checked for executable gencode scripts.
       The gencode scripts generate the code to be executed on the target on stdout. If the
       gencode executables fail, they must print diagnostic messages on stderr and exit non-zero.

STAGE 6: CODE EXECUTION

       For every object the resulting code from the previous stage is transferred to the target
       host and executed there to apply the configuration changes.

STAGE 7: CACHE

       The cache stores the information from the current run for later use.

SUMMARY

       If, and only if, all the stages complete without an errors, the configuration will be
       applied to the target.

SEE ALSO

       •   cdist(1)

       •   cdist-reference(7)

COPYING

       Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Nico Schottelius, Steven Armstrong. 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-STAGES(7)