rhn_satellite

RhnSatellite is a ruby api to the RedHat Satellite

It provides an easy way to interact with a RedHat Satellite API. Mainly the XMLRPC calls are wrapped with a few methods, so that talking to the API from ruby is much easier.

It is far from complete, but most methods that have been added have been tested and used in real environments with the latest satellite. The existing methods should get you an idea how to add missing methods.

Patches (including tests) are welcomed!

RedHat’s API is documented here: docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Network_Satellite/5.4.1/html/API_Overview/index.html

Credentials

By default rhn_satellite will look for a yaml containing credentials in ‘~/.satellite.yaml` or in `/etc/satellite.yaml` . This file should contain the following options:

hostname: satellite.example.com
username: foobar
password: foobar
https:    true

However, you can always set later your own credentials for the whole API:

RhnSatellite::Connection::Handler.default_hostname = 'satellite2.example.com'
RhnSatellite::Connection::Handler.default_username = 'testuser'
RhnSatellite::Connection::Handler.default_password = 'testpwd'

Or different ones on subparts of the api:

RhnSatellite::Channel.hostname = 'satellite.example.com'
RhnSatellite::Channel.username = 'channel'
RhnSatellite::Channel.password = 'channel'

Examples

A few examples should give an idea how things should work:

Get a system

Fetch a system from the satellite.

satellite_system = RhnSatellite::System.get('somenode.example.com')

clone channel

Clone a new channel.

RhnSatellite::ChannelSoftware.clone(
  'original_label',
  'new_label',
  'new_label,
  "Some clone of original_label",
  false
)

Schedule update of all updateable packages

This will get all packages that can be upgraded for a system and will schedule the immediate upgrade of these packages.

satellite_system = RhnSatellite::System.get('somenode.example.com')
packages_to_update = RhnSatellite::System.latest_upgradable_packages(satellite_system['id']).inject({}) { |res,p|
  # sometimes the satellite lists some weird packages, so we check if they actually exist.
  key = "#{p['name']}-#{p['version']}-#{p['release']}.#{p['arch']}"
  res[key] = p['to_package_id'] if RhnSatellite::Packages.exists?(p['to_package_id'])
  res
}.values.compact
if packages_to_update.size > 0
  now = Time.now
  patch_time = XMLRPC::DateTime.new(now.year,now.month,now.day,now.hour,now.min, now.sec)
  RhnSatellite::System.schedule_package_install(satellite_system['id'],packages_to_update,patch_time)
end

Contributing to rhn_satellite

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it
Fork the project
Start a feature/bugfix branch
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.