Matrix Systemd Updater

Purpose

The Matrix Systemd Updater was initially created for the purpose of being able to, in conjuction with crontab automate the updating of Matrix homeservers and bridges. Ultimately, what was produced may well be a general purpose systemd updater utility.

Installation

Prequisites

  • Systemd installed on your Linux distribution
  • Go 1.12+ (whenever modules were introduced)

Instructions

  1. Ensure that your $GOROOT is a part of your $PATH
  2. Navigate to the root of this directory
  3. Run go install.

Usage

The usage of the updater is pretty straightforward:

matrix-systemd-updater { -help | [-configDirectory] configfilePath }

-help: prints the help message describing how to use the utility configDirectory: indicates that configfilePath corresponds to a directory configFilePath: fully qualified or relative path indicating the location of the configuration that details how to update a systemd service. If the configDirectory flag is not present, configfilePath must correspond to YAML file. When the flag is present, configfilePath corresponds to a directory containing valid YAML files.

Configuration File

Properties

The configuration file contains the following YAML mappings:

  • workingDirectory (optional) – The directory from which the updater should execute the commands specified in the configuration file
  • exitOnError (optional) – Indicates if an upgrade of a service should be attempted when one of the pre-upgrade commands fails. The default value is false but must be set to true if workingDirectory is populated.
  • serviceName (required) – the name of the systemd service being upgraded
  • preUpgradeCmds (optional) – A sequence of ConfigCommands that need to be executed before the the updater performs the service upgrade (e.g. git pull)
  • upgradeCmd (required) – The ConfigCommand responsible for building, installing, or downloading the upgraded executable for the systemd service.
  • postUpgradeCmds (optional) – A sequence of ConfigCommands that need to be executed after the upgrade is complete but before the updater restarts the systemd service

The ConfigCommand Structure

The preUpgradeCmds, upgradeCmd, and postUpgradeCmds all take a singular mapping or a sequence of mappings representing ConfigCommands. ConfigCommand is a structure that has the following mappings:

  • command (required) – The command to be executed by the updater. It should only contain the name of the command and no arguments. The command must exist in the current PATH.
  • args (optional) – A sequence of arguments to the command. Given the format $command $arg1 $flag1 $arg2 $flag2..., all arguments, flags, and flag-bound arguments should exist as separate entries.

Caveats

Go’s exec package doesn’t allow for the use of common built-in shell functions such as cd (from my experimentation, even help isn’t an option). This creates problems when updating python-based systemd services that were set up using virtualenv. In order to support upgrades of these services, the upgrade command ConfigCommand struct must:

  1. have a command property taking the form bash -c "source $virtualenvPath/activate && $yourUpgradeCommand $yourUpgradeCommandArgs"
  2. have no args

Example

An example of valid configuration file is located in the test config directory.

GitHub

View Github