Faq

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. 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

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 a bit of overlap between rundeck and Puppet's mcollective and Chef's knife. The three allow administrators to execute commands in a distributed environment. Rundeck has different goals though:

• firstly, we want to create an easy way to define routine sequences as "Job workflows"
• secondly, we are very interested in using metadata-level searches for defining targeted sets of nodes (that's a bit like knife)
• we also see role-based access controls as a primary feature since we envision rundeck as a point of delegation for self-service

Ultimately, we plan on refactoring RunDeck to accept "dispatch providers" to delegate to tools like mcollective and knife.

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?

• Chef server: https://github.com/opscode/chef-rundeck
• Puppet: https://github.com/jamtur01/puppet-rundeck