Templates

Templates

awless writing operations to the cloud infrastructure relies on the concepts of templates. A template in awless describes a list of actions updating the cloud. For instance, this would be a one-liner template:

create instance subnet=subnet-356d517f image=ami-70edb016 type=t2.micro

This one line template contains an action create on an entity followed by a list of params.

Parameters can be either:

• given directly through the command line as key=value arguments
• filled transparently filled by your local config defaults (i.e: instance ami, instance type, etc...)
• completed through dynamic CLI prompting for missing required arguments

Under the hood, an awless template is parsed with a parsing expression grammar in order to build an abstract syntax tree. Then the AST is traversed by a given cloud driver (i.e: AWS aws-sdk-go) to perform the action against the cloud

The awless CLI provides 2 ways of executing templates:

1. awless run that takes as an argument the filepath of a template local file.

    $ awless run ~/templates/create_infra.txt
   

2. template one-liner

    $ awless create instance name=my-instance
    $ awless delete subnet ...
    $ awless stop instance id=i-6fg5h4j
   

Template file and syntax

You can also load more complex templates combining multiple commands in a template file through the awless run command.

For example, the following template file:

stop instance id=@my-instance
subnet = create subnet cidr={subnet.cidr} vpc={subnet.vpc}
create tags resource=$subnet Name={subnet.name}
update subnet id=$subnet public-vms=true
rtable = create routetable vpc={subnet.vpc}
attach routetable id=$rtable subnet=$subnet
route = create route cidr=0.0.0.0/0 gateway={vpc.gateway} table=$rtable

References

Templates have variable assignment syntax to store mainly references to newly created resource that can be referenced later using the $ syntax

Holes

Templates has simple {} syntax for value that will be filled in later by your predefined defaults or through CLI prompting.

Aliases

When using the @ syntax in templates you reference a resource by its name instead of a cryptic id. Behind the scene, awless will resolve the id and use during execution.

One-liner template command

Using the awless CLI help you can get all the information on the execution of the builtin one-liner.

    $ awless
    $ awless -h                  # display all known template commands
    $ awless create              # display help for create and on which resources it applies
    $ awless stop                # display help for stop and on which resources it applies
    $ awless start instance -h   # display required and extra paramaters for this command