Table of Contents
Cdist is a usable configuration management system. The easiest way to get started with cdist is to initialise the environment and run cdist-quickstart:
eval `./bin/cdist-env` && cdist-quickstart
Cdist configurations are written in the shell scripting language. The mapping of configurations to hosts is defined in so called manifests, logical units of functionality are called "types" in cdist jargon. Cdist ships with some types included. You can use or change them, create new ones or even submit your types for inclusion into cdist.
The main command is cdist-deploy-to, which runs several stages to push configurations to a host. If you want to deeply understand cdist, reading the source of cdist-deploy-to is recommended. Cdist currently uses the push approach (a server pushes out the configuration to the clients), but future version will also support the pull mechanism (client requests configuration).