Category: General

Introduction

One of the things I am heavily involved to is doing all sorts of infrastructure automation, and while ansible is a perfect tool for system administration automation, when it comes to more complex things like interacting with different APIs, and making all kind of more hardcore things, Robo.li (robo) is what can really save you.

I have started learning robo few weeks ago, but the problem is that they have pretty short documentation, and few basic examples, so it was not that easy at all and I am still in the process of finding best ways to go around, but I already have quite few things that I want to share here for anyone to use and for me have it saves in a safe place.

Ok, this one gonna be long enough and even probably a series of posts, but I have to share my experience.

While you can use single RoboFile.php with all commands you need in the project directory and call it via ./vendor/bin/robo, this is not a very comfortable approach for complex things, as this file get huge and messy very-very fast. For a proper use of robo, you should write a set of tasks, a set of command classes and then use all of it from your stand-alone robo app. For a sake of example, lets assume that all robo related commands and tasks are under src/Robo directory with Foo\Robo namespace prefix and you have a robo.php file with the actual app that you call.

To make it clear, here is a directory structure I have with some real tasks and commands already in place:

.
├── composer.json
├── composer.lock
├── .env
├── README.md
├── robo.php
└── src
    └── Robo
        ├── AbstractApiTask.php
        ├── AbstractCommand.php
        ├── AbstractTask.php
        ├── Command
        │   ├── BitbucketCommand.php
        │   ├── HipchatCommand.php
        │   └── RedmineCommand.php
        └── Task
            ├── Bitbucket
            │   ├── BranchRestrict.php
            │   ├── BranchUnrestrict.php
            │   ├── RepoCreate.php
            │   └── RepoDelete.php
            ├── Hipchat
            │   ├── RoomCreate.php
            │   └── RoomDelete.php
            └── Redmine
                └── ProjectCreate.php

(vendor directory is excluded on purpose to make tree clear)

Configuration

So now we have all in place and first thing first – we need to configure our app with a variety of different parameters. Robo does have Config implemented and configuration part is covered in a Robo as a Framework section of their site, but that mostly rely on storing your configuration in YML files, while I already have all configuration in a $config array and need to supply it to robo. To do that, we need to create a default robo container and pass our config to it, so in robo.php we have:

\Robo\Robo::createDefaultContainer(null, null, null, $config); 
$statusCode = \Robo\Robo::run(
    $_SERVER['argv'],
    $commandClasses,
    "Foo Robo",
    "v0.0.1"
);

Moreover, as we are passing the $commandClasses array with a list of the command classes, we want that part to be auto-generated as well, so above the code that creates a container we have:

$cmdPath = "src/Robo/Command";
$cmdNamespace = "\\Foo\\Robo\\Command";
$commandClasses = [];
foreach (glob("$cmdPath/*.php") as $file) {
    if (preg_match('/^.*\/(.*)\.php$/', $file, $matches) and class_exists($cmdNamespace . "\\" . $matches[1])) {
        $commandClasses []= $cmdNamespace . "\\" . $matches[1];
    }
}

And that’s pretty much all we need to have in robo.php apart of the code that fill the $config array, which is irrelevant to this blog post.

Task auto-loading

One thing that I found annoying in Extending robo how-to is the way they load tasks to commands. Basically for each collection of tasks you would have a loadTasks trait that describes each task and then you use it in the command class. While traits are questionable by nature, writing lots of same functions for a purpose of describing tasks is boring, time consuming and no way flexible. So instead of doing trait bullshit, we go with magic __call method in the AbstractCommand class that is extended by all actual tasks:

<?php
/**
 * Base command class for Foo Robo.li
 *
 * @see http://robo.li/
 */
namespace Foo\Robo;

use \Robo\Common\ConfigAwareTrait as configTrait;

abstract class AbstractCommand extends \Robo\Tasks
{
    use configTrait;

    /**
     * @var string $taskDir path to Tasks dir relative to our namespace
     */
    protected $taskDir = 'Task';

    /**
     * Magic __call that tries to find and execute a correct task based
     * on called method name that must start with 'task'
     *
     * @param string $method Method name that was called
     * @param array $args Arguments that were passed to the method
     *
     * @return 
     */
    public function __call($method, $args = null)
    {
        if (preg_match('/^task([A-Z]+.*?)([A-Z]+.*)$/', $method, $matches)) {
            $className = __NAMESPACE__ . "\\" . $this->taskDir . "\\" . $matches[1] . "\\" . $matches[2];
            if (!class_exists($className)) {
                throw new \RuntimeException("Failed to find class '$className' for '$method' task");
            }
            return $this->task($className, $args);
        }
        throw new \RuntimeException("Called to undefined method '$method' of '" . get_called_class() . "'");
    }
}

This class follows the naming convention and directory structure to auto-load tasks based on the method names and in out example the following code will work as expected from inside any command:

$this->taskHipchatRoomCreate()
     ->name("foobar")
     ->run();

$this->taskBitBucketRepoCreate()
     ->name("foobar.com")
     ->run();

So now we are focused only on writing tasks (example):

<?php

namespace Foo\Robo\Task\Hipchat;

use Robo\Result;
use Foo\Utility\Hash;

/**
 * Creates a HipChat room.
 *
 * 
 * <?php
 * $this->taskRoomCreate()
 * ->name('testroomname')
 * ->topic('This is a test room. Feel free to chat')
 * ->privacy('public')
 * ->run();
 * ?>
 * 
 */
class RoomCreate extends \Foo\Robo\AbstractApiTask
{
    /**
     * @var array data
     * @see https://www.hipchat.com/docs/apiv2/method/create_room
     */
    protected $data = [
        'name'                      => null,
        'privacy'                   => 'public',
        'delegate_admin_visibility' => null,
        'topic'                     => null,
        'guest_access'              => false
    ];

    /**
     * @var array requiredData
     * @see https://www.hipchat.com/docs/apiv2/method/create_room
     */
    protected $requiredData = [
        'name'
    ];

    /**
     * {@inheritdoc}
     */
    public function run()
    {
        
        $result = parent::run();
        if (!$result->wasSuccessful()) {
            return $result;
        }

        $this->printInfo("Creating {name} room", $this->data);

        try {
            $data = $this->api->post('room', $this->data);
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            return Result::fromException($this, $e);
        }

        if (!$data || !is_array($data)) {
            return Result::error($this, "Failed to create room", $this->data);
        }

        // Because the create call returns only id, we'll make a new call to get
        // complete info about new room

        $this->printInfo("Retrieving {name} room info", $this->data['name']);
        
        try {
            $data = $this->api->get('room/' . $data['id']);
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            return Result::fromException($this, $e);
        }

        if (!$data || !is_array($data)) {
            return Result::error($this, "Failed to retrieve room info", $this->data);
        }

        $data = array_filter(Hash::flatten($data));
        return Result::success($this, "Room successfully created", $data);
    }
}

and commands (example):

<?php

/**
 * Foo HipChat Robo.li commands file
 *
 * @see http://robo.li
 */

namespace Foo\Robo\Command;

use \Consolidation\OutputFormatters\StructuredData\PropertyList;
use \Foo\Robo\AbstractCommand;

class HipchatCommand extends AbstractCommand
{

    /**
     * Create a HipChat room
     *
     * @param string $name Room name
     * @param string $topic Room topic
     * @param string $privacy Room privacy
     *
     * @option string $format Output format (table, list, csv, json, xml)
     * @option string $fields Limit output to given fields, comma-separated
     *
     * @return PropertyList Room info
     *
     * @field-labels:
     *   id: id
     *   name: name
     *   topic: topic
     *   privacy: privacy
     *   xmpp_jid: xmpp_jid
     *   is_archived: is_archived
     *   is_guest_accessible: is_guest_accessible
     *   owner.id: owner_id
     *   owner.name: owner_name
     *   created: created
     *   last_active: last_active
     */
    public function hipchatRoomCreate($name, $topic = "", $privacy = 'public', $opts = ['format' => 'table', 'fields' => ''])
    {
        $result = $this->taskHipchatRoomCreate()
            ->name($name)
            ->topic($topic)
            ->privacy($privacy)
            ->run();

        return new PropertyList($result->getData());
    }

    /**
     * Delete HipChat room
     *
     * @param string $name Room name
     *
     * @option bool $force Force deletion
     *
     * @return bool true on success and false on failure
     */
    public function hipchatRoomDelete($name, $opts = ['force' => false ])
    {
        if (!$opts['force']) {
            $this->say("Won't delete anything unless you force me to");
            return false;
        }

        return $this->taskHipchatRoomDelete()
            ->name($name)
            ->run();
    }
}

I hope this post will be useful for someone (at least for me). There are few things in the examples above that are also tricks and not really standard to robo, including printInfo() method, data and requiredData properties, etc, but that will be covered later in another post.