RECLASS(1)

📦
version 1.7.1 · 2 versions
, in debian trixie, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ RECLASS(1) ✨

okay bestie, pull up a chair because we're about to talk about reclass — section 1 of your manual, the command-line interface era 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

reclass — literally the command-line interface, that's it, that's the name 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

reclass --help
reclass [options] --inventory
reclass [options] --nodeinfo=NODENAME

like, those are your three moves. pick one. slay ✨

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so reclass is an "external node classifier" (ENC) — and before you ask, yes, that's the whole vibe — the kind you'd use with automation tools like Puppet, Salt, and Ansible. it's also a stand-alone tool for merging data sources recursively. dual threat, main character energy 👑

the whole point of an ENC is to let a system administrator keep an inventory of nodes to be managed completely separately from the configuration of the automation tool. no cap. usually the external node classifier just fully replaces the tool-specific inventory — think site.pp for Puppet, ext_pillar/master_tops for Salt, or /etc/ansible/hosts. iconic behaviour honestly.

so, with respect to the configuration management tool, the ENC fulfills two jobs:

  • it provides information about groups of nodes and group memberships
  • it gives access to node-specific information, such as variables

reclass lets you define your nodes through class inheritance, while always being able to override details further up the tree (i.e. in more specific nodes). think of classes as feature sets, as commonalities between nodes, or as tags. 🏷️ add to that the ability to nest classes (multiple inheritance is allowed, well-defined, and encouraged — yes encouraged, we love a polyamorous class hierarchy 🫶), and you can assemble your infrastructure from smaller bits, eliminating duplication and exposing all important parameters to a single location, logically organised. and if that isn't enough, reclass lets you reference other parameters in the very hierarchy you are currently assembling. the way that it just… does that 😭

reclass will be used indirectly through adapters most of the time. however, there exists a command-line interface that allows querying the database. this manual page describes this interface. that's what we're doing here. hi. welcome. 🎀

✨ OPTIONS ✨

please see the output of reclass --help for the default values of these options — like, the defaults live over there, not here, okay? 💅

🗄️ Database options

  • -s, --storage-type — the type of storage backend to use
  • -b, --inventory-base-uri — the base URI to prepend to nodes and classes
  • -u, --nodes-uri — the URI to the nodes storage
  • -c, --classes-uri — the URI to the classes storage

🎨 Output options

  • -o, --output — the output format to use (yaml or json)
  • -y, --pretty-print — try to make the output prettier (it's giving glow-up ✨)

🕹️ Modes

  • -i, --inventory — output the entire inventory
  • -n, --nodeinfo — output information for a specific node

ℹ️ Information

  • -h, --help — help output
  • --version — display version number

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

please visit http://reclass.pantsfullofunix.net/ for more information about reclass. it's the lore hub, fr fr 🌈

the documentation is also available from the ./doc subtree in the source checkout, or from /usr/share/doc/reclass-doc. pick your fave, they're all valid 💜

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

martin f. krafft

2013, martin f. krafft

and that's the whole page bestie 💖 this was reclass 1.7, dated Feb 13, 2025 — go forth and classify those external nodes, you absolute legend 👑🌸✨

📦 where this page comes from