Hosts

Hosts are an important concept in bois. Since bois is designed for your personal computers, your machines are configured on a hostname basis.

The configuration files for your machines are located in the host directory.
Imagine having two machines named strelok and artifact (which are also their respective hostnames). The directory structure might look something like this:

 📁 groups/
 📂 hosts/
 │ 📂 artifact/
 │ │ 📁 udev/
 │ │ 📁 X11/
 │ │ pacman.conf
 │ │ host.yml
 │ └ vars.yml
 └ 📂 strelok/
   │ host.yml
   └ vars.yml

• The host.yml file is required to exist in every host directory. It allows you to set host-specific configuration defaults and determines which groups are going to be included for this host.
• All variables inside the vars.yml are exposed to the templating engine. Read the templating docs for detailed info. The top level of the vars.yml is expected to be an object. I.e.

  encrypt: false
  machine:
    threads: 8
    is_laptop: true
  

• All other files that’re located in a host’s directory are considered configuration files that should be deployed to the system. In the example above, that would be the X11 and udev folders, as well as the pacman.conf for the artifact host.

Let’s anticipate the next chapter a tiny bit, which will be about groups. Groups are a tool to allow reuse of configuration files across multiple hosts.

In contrast to groups, host configuration files are always exclusive for a specific host. This allows you have a strict distinction between reusable logic, which is kept inside of groups, and machine specific configuration, which is located the machine’s respective host directory.

host.yml

The following is a full example of a host.yml:

# Groups that're required by this host.
groups:
  - base
  - laptop
  - games

# Packages that should always be installed for this host.
packages:
  pacman:
    - linux
    - base-devel
    - tuned

# Defaults that should be applied to all files.
file_defaults:
  owner: root
  group: root
  file_mode: 0o644
  directory_mode: 0o755

• groups: List<String> The list of groups that’re enabled for this host. The group names correspond to the group’s directory names inside the top-level groups directory.
• packages: Map<String -> List<String>>: A list of packages sorted by package manager. Look at Package Management to see the list of available package managers.
• file_defaults Set defaults file permissions for all configuration files that’re inside this host directory.
  • owner: String - The file’s owner
  • group: String - The file’s assigned group
  • file_mode: OctalInt - The default permissions that’ll be set for all files.
  • directory_mode: OctalInt - The default permissions that’ll be set for all directories.