Provo - Taming the Chaos of Automation Scripts

Provo is a modular framework designed to streamline the automation of your workflows, especially when it comes to setting up and provisioning environments. Think of it as a powerful manager for all your automation scripts.

Provo's strength lies in its modularity. It helps you organize your collection of automation scripts into a system of reusable modules. Want to quickly set up a new VM? Configure your editor just the way you like it? Deploy your dotfiles? Provo makes it a breeze. Simply clone your Provo setup to any machine and, with a single command, run the workflow you need.

Use Cases

• Working with Remote Hosts: Connect to different VMs to investigate logs, perform active debugging, or leave a script running overnight. Run your setup and work within the comfort of your custom environment, even if they were bare systems with outdated shells, basic prompts, and missing needed packages.

• Configuring a New Developer Laptop: Migrate years of fine-tuning your development environment to a new laptop without hassle. Don't worry if your old laptop is gone, the image is incompatible, or cloud restore is hanging – with a modular system, it's easy to keep setup scripts up-to-date and get running in no time.

• Synchronizing Multiple Environments: Maintain a consistent look and feel across your macOS laptop, Debian VMs, and Windows desktop with WSL2 and Ubuntu.

• Moving Your Website to a New Host: Seamlessly transition your website from Amazon AWS to Google Cloud (or any other host) by recreating all your setups, including MySQL, Apache, WordPress, etc.

• Provisioning a New VM: With scripted CLI tools quickly provision a new development VM to replace a misbehaving one or add more boxes to distribute the load.

With Provo and your custom modules, you can configure your shell, prompt, and editor, unroll your development setup, launch a VM, or migrate a host within seconds, boosting your productivity.

Features

• Modular Design: Promotes organizing your automation scripts into reusable, self-contained modules.
• Dependency Management: Verifies that declared requirements are met before running any module actions.
• Error Handling: Propagates error codes from individual modules to the framework, allowing for easy identification and debugging.
• Safe Execution: Stops execution if any error or missing dependency is detected, ensuring the correct order of module execution.

Installation

While you can clone Provo directly:

git clone https://github.com/bryndin/provo

It's typically recommended to fork the repository to customize it with your own modules:

1. Fork the Provo repository on GitHub.

2. Clone your forked repository:

   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/provo.git

3. Create and add your modules to the modules directory.

   See Modules Docs.

This approach allows you to easily manage your custom modules and keep them separate from the original Provo repository.

Usage

1. Specify an action and modules:

   Provide an action (install, update, or remove) to run on a list of modules:

   ./provo [install|update|remove] [module1 module2 ...]

2. Hardcode common modules (optional):

   If you have a predominantly common setup, hardcode it in the MODULES list inside the provo script and omit passing modules:

   ./provo [install|update|remove]

Modules

Modules are the core concept in Provo, representing units of provisioning logic. Convert your automation scripts into Provo's modules to leverage the framework's capabilities for organizing, managing, and running these scripts in a standardized manner.

Modules Docs cover the Modules and Action Scripts structure, and explain how to create modules.