Difficulty: Basic
Time: Approximately 5 minutes
At the most basic level bolt can be used to run arbitrary commands on a set of remote hosts. Let's see that in practice before we move on to more useful higher-level features. In particular we'll look at:
Feel free to just run one of these exercises depending on your operating system environment.
For the following exercises you should already have bolt installed and have a few nodes (either Windows or Linux) available to run commands against. The following guides will help:
bolt by default uses SSH for transport, and will reuse your existing SSH configuration for authentication. If you can SSH to a node using an SSH another client then bolt should just work. That normally means just providing configuration in ~/.ssh/config. Running a command against a remote node is done with the following:
bolt command run <command> --nodes <nodes>
Let's run the uptime command. Replace node1 in the following with the address of one of your own nodes.
$ bolt command run uptime --nodes node1
node1:
07:20:08 up 6:33, 0 users, load average: 0.20, 0.05, 0.01
Ran on 1 node in 0.06 seconds
bolt can also run commands against multiple nodes by passing a command separated list. Replace node1,node2 in the following with two or more of your own nodes.
$ bolt command run uptime --nodes node1,node2
node1:
07:43:58 up 6:57, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
node2:
07:43:58 up 6:57, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Ran on 2 nodes in 0.13 seconds
If you're accessing nodes using a username and password rather than keys you can pass those on the command line like so:
bolt command run <command> --nodes <node> --user <user> --password <password>
bolt has a number of other flags. Run the following command to list all of them:
bolt --help
bolt can communicate over WinRM and execute PowerShell commands when running Windows nodes. The command will look like the following:
bolt command run <command> --nodes winrm://<node> --user <user> --password <password>
Note the winrm:// prefix for the node address. Also note the --username and --password flags for passing authentication information. You can see all of the available flags by running:
bolt --help
If you're trying bolt out using Windows run the following command, replacing node1 with the address of your Windows node. This should list all of the processes running on the remote machine.
bolt command run "gps | select ProcessName" --nodes winrm://node1 --user <user> --password <password>
The above example accesses a single node. You can also provide a command separated list of nodes like so:
bolt command run <command> --nodes winrm://<node>,winrm://<node> --user <user> --password <password>
Now you know how to run adhoc commands with bolt you can move on to: