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General

What is RunDeck?

RunDeck is cross-platform open source software that helps you automate ad-hoc and routine procedures in data center or cloud environments. RunDeck allows you to run tasks on any number of nodes from a web-based or command-line interface. RunDeck also includes other features that make it easy to scale up your scripting efforts including: access control, workflow building, scheduling, logging, and integration with external sources for node and option data.

Licensing and Pricing

Rundeck software is free and completely open source. It's licensed under the terms of the Apache 2.0. There are no hidden "gotchas" or some other "enterprise" version that you must pay for, everything we do is free open source software. Download it. Try it. Use it. If you find value in it and would like to actively participate in the project, introduce yourself on the mailing list.

Where is the mailing list?

At google groups: http://groups.google.com/group/rundeck-discuss

Where is the IRC channel?

At irc.freenode.net #rundeck

You can see the irc logs here: http://irclog.rundeck.org

Where do I download development builds?

Download a development build from our hudson instance here: http://build.rundeck.org

How is it different than Puppet mcollective or Chef knife?

There is some overlap between rundeck and Puppet's mcollective and Chef's knife. The three allow administrators to execute commands in a distributed environment. Each provides a mechanism to use metadata-level searches for defining targeted nodes. The three also provide levels of authorization, authentication and auditing.

Rundeck has a few goals of its own though:

  • Firstly, we want to create an easy way to define routine sequences as "Job workflows" as a basis for runbook automation solutions.
  • Secondly, enable the integration of node and environment metadata sources as RunDeck "resource model providers".
  • Thirdly, evolve role-based access control definitions into a high level DSL that ties privilege level to resource model and workflow actions
  • Lastly, we plan on refactoring RunDeck to accept "dispatch providers" to delegate to tools like mcollective, knife and others for cross tool execution.

Ultimately, we want to create a tool that is simple to use for the end user of the automated process.

Interoperability

Is RunDeck cross-platform?

We're designing RunDeck to work on unix flavors and windows. This assumes the commands you execute can run on the targeted host.

What operating systems does RunDeck run on?

Currently, we test on Linux and MacOSX. It should work on Solaris and BSD. We haven't done extensive testing on Windows yet.

Security

Can I use SSL?

Yes, RunDeck server can be configured to use SSL. Consult the Security section in the manual. http://rundeck.org/docs/RunDeck-Guide.html#configuring-rundeck-for-ssl

Technical

Where are 3rd party resource model providers?