mbutane is a wrapper for Butane that merges multiple human-readable Butane configs and translates them into machine-readable Ignition configs.

mbutane takes a path to a directory as only argument (defaults to the current working dir) and expects a config.bu as main Butane config file there. You can merge additional Butane config files into the resulting Ignition config by adding more *.bu files to the optional config.bu.d directory.

Optionally you can also create a src/ directory with any number of file trees to be embedded in the Ignition config. mbutane will create entries for any file, directory, and link it finds there (excluding .gitignore files), including file contents and link targets. For the main config.bu you can use the src/main/ directory. For any additional Butane config below config.bu.d, use a matching directory (e.g. use src/my-user/ for config.bu.d/my-user.bu). File permissions and ownership are not preserved, except for executable files, which will receive rwxr-xr-x permissions by default.

To specify file permissions, ownership and whether existing files should be overwritten, you can use subconfig.bu files anywhere in the file tree. subconfig.bu are YAML files with the files, directories, and links mappings. They all expect a list of objects with a path pattern (a glob pattern relative to the current directory) and optional user, group, mode, and overwrite keys matching those of a regular Butane config.

Here's an example of a subconfig.bu at src/my-user/home/my-user/subconfig.bu. It ensures that all files, directories and links below /home/my-user are owned by user my-user, that /home/my-user itself has permissions 0700 and all files below /home/my-user/.local/bin are executable (this would not have been necessary if the source files had been executable already).

directories:
  - path: /
    mode: 0700
  - path: "*"
    user: { name: "my-user" }
    group: { name: "my-user" }
files:
  - path: /.local/bin/*
    mode: 0755
  - path: "*"
    user: { name: "my-user" }
    group: { name: "my-user" }
    overwrite: true
links:
  - path: "*"
    user: { name: "my-user" }
    group: { name: "my-user" }
    overwrite: true

The file tree is merged into config.bu.d/my-user.bu, which is later merged into the main config.bu. mbutane will then execute Butane and write the resulting Ignition config to config.ign. If this file exists already, it is overwritten.

You can install mbutane locally with Python's setuptools:

python setup.py install --user

mbutane is a wrapper for Butane, thus you must also install Butane locally. It either expects a butane executable in your $PATH, or you must give its path using the --butane option. You can either use Butane from your package sources, download one of Butane's release binaries, or use a container-based version of Butane. Please refer to Butane's "Getting Started" docs for help.

Additionally it requires PyYAML (or any compatible implementation). You can either install PyYAML from your package sources, or use pip:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

mbutane was written for Python 3.6, but should work with any later Python 3 version. If it doesn't, please file a bug report.

Copyright (C) 2021-2022 Daniel Rudolf <https://www.daniel-rudolf.de>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3 of the License only.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.