wsh

wsh is a shell-like program made for devops and sysadmins that need to administer several machines at once. With wsh, you can ssh into multiple machines and run one-off commands very simply

What wsh isn't

• configuration management
• a shell
• an ssh replacement

Dependencies

• glib2 >= 2.32
• libssh >= 0.6.0 (NOT libssh2)
• protobuf-c
• sudo

Build deps

• cmake
• c compiler (gcc/clang)
• make/ninja
• doxygen if you want API docs

Architecture

wshd is a program that resides on remote hosts. wshc ssh's into them, honoring your ssh config and exec's wshd. Over the secure ssh pipe, wshc issues instructions to wshd, and wshd executes them on the remote host. If privileges need to be raised, wshc will prompt you for creds prior to ssh'ing, and submit them once the ssh connection has been established.

Advantages

• configuration-less

wsh honors your existing ssh and sudo configuration files, leaving all of the work of authorization and authentication to ssh and sudo

• sudo-ready

Unlike dsh, wsh has sudo support built in, so that you don't need to use some kind of hack to get your sudo creds over the network.

• logging

wsh logs everything to syslog

BUILDING

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ sudo make install

How does this compare to ansible and fabric?

I happen to have 1600 hosts lying around so...

wshc -f hosts -t 100 -- uname -a  18.88s user 2.02s system 92% cpu 22.630 total
ansible all -i ./hosts -f 30 -a "uname -a"  702.94s user 8.69s system 128% cpu 9:11.77 total
fab -H $(paste -s hosts -d,) -D -P -- uname -a  176.96s user 90.55s system 332% cpu 1:20.55 total

[ worr on worr-ld1 ] ( ~ ) % wc -l hosts
1611 hosts

Where can I get help?

The mailing list:

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wsh-users

Or the IRC channel on Freenode

• #wsh