Provisioning servers

It's easy to provision servers and manage containers across servers.

We will use s1 and s2 as example server names in this section

To add a server use the addserver command.

flockport addserver s1 [serverip]

This will connect to the server ip provided, generate certs, setup a secure connection and install Flockport

The s1 name is simply a server name for Flockport to refer to the server.

You can specify a user and ssh port when adding a server

flockport addserver s1 192.168.122.10 -u user -p sshport

s1 is the servername, 192.168.122.10. is the server IP. The '-u' flag specifies the user to connect to the server as and the '-p' flag specifies the ssh port. If not provided the default user is 'root' and the default port is 22

The servers needs to be a supported flockport distribution ie Xenial, Bionic, Stretch, CentOS 7 or Alpine Linux. See the Linux support matrix here

Flockport will automatically detect the server os, verify if it is supported and install Flockport on the server. Once installed you can manage servers and containers across servers.

System level activity like adding networks and orchestration across servers requires root privileges so you need to have root privilges on the server

We strongly recommend using passwordless sudo accounts. Every Flockport action may require multiple steps and without a passwordless sudo automation becomes impossible and as you will get a password prompt for each action

Managing servers

To list added servers use the listservers command

flockport listservers

This will show you all servers along with their IPs, user connected as and sshport.

You can set server parameters with the changeserver command

flockport changeserver s1 -p port -i IP

You can use the '-p' flag to change the server ssh port and the '-i' flag to change the server IP.

You can also get a summary of the server with the stats command.

flockport stats s1

This will show your stats on s1 server

You can also upgrade flockport installations on servers with the upgrade command

flockport upgrade s1

This will check if any upgrades are available and upgrade the flockport installation if required

Pushing containers

You can push containers to servers and also pull containers from them

flockport push c1 s1

This pushes container c1 to server s1

To pull a container c2 from server s1

flockport pull s1:c1

This will pull container c1 from s1 server to your localhost

You can also push and pull container across servers

flockport push s1:c1 s2

This will push c1 container from server s1 to s2

Moving containers across servers is fast and seamless

Orchestrating containers

You can run flockport commands on any added servers with the '-s' flag

flockport -s s1 ls

This will list all containers on the s1 server

flockport -s s1 ps

This will list all running containers on the s1 server

All flockport commands can be run via the '-s' flag

flockport -s s1 start c1

This start the c1 container on server s1

flockport -s s1 stop c1

This will stop the c1 container on server s1

A number of functions are available without the '-s' flag

flockport ls s1

This lists all containers on server s1

You can also run the command on multiple servers

flockport ls s1 s2

This will run the ls command on both s1 and s2

This also applies to commands like ps

flockport ps s1

You can also use a colon to specify server commands

flockport info s1:alpine

This will run the info command on the alpine container in s1

flockport start s1:alpine

This will start the alpine container on server s1

flockport stop s1:alpine

Tag and group servers

Just like containers you can tag and group servers. This allows you to perform actions on groups of servers. When tagging servers use the '-s' flag.

flockport tag -s s1 us-west db

This tags s1 with the us-west and db tag

You can also use groups. Tags let you apply multiple tags to a server while groups allows you to add a single tag to multiple servers.

flockport addgroup -s us-west s1 s2 s3

This add servers s1, s2 and s3 to the us-west group

You can perform group actions on tags or groups with the -'sg' flag

flockport -sg us-west ls

This list containers on all servers in the us-west group

A number of commands are available for use for group actions

Updating servers

You can update servers with the upgrade command

flockport update s1

This will update the Flockport installation on server s1 if required

You can update multiple server at once.

flockport update s1 s2 s3

This will update servers s1, s2 and s3

To update the local installation use the 'local' keyword

flockport update local

This will update the local flockport installation