Choria RPC Command Type

The RPC command interact with the Choria RPC system used execute actions on remote nodes.

Since this is built into Choria it will simply use your Choria Client configuration for the user executing the command to find the Choria Brokers and more. It supports the usual override methods such as creating a choria.conf file in your project working directory. No connection properties are required or supported.

Before using this command type I suggest reading about Choria Concepts.

The rpc command supports data transformations.

Version Hint

This feature is only available when hosting App Builder applications within the Choria Server version 0.26.0 or newer

Overview

This command supports all the standard properties like Arguments, Flags, Banners and more, it also incorporates the discovery features of the Discover Command Type in order to address nodes.

Below a simple RPC request.

name: stop
description: Stops the Service gracefully
type: rpc

request:
  agent: service
  action: stop
  inputs:
    service: httpd

This will look and behave exactly like choria req service stop service=httpd.

Adjusting CLI Behavior

A number of settings exist to adjust the behavior or add flags to the CLI at runtime. Generally you can either allow users to supply values sugh as --json, or force the output to be JSON but you cannot allow both at present:

Setting	Description
`std_filters`	Enables standard filter flags like `-C`, `-W` and more
`output_format`	Forces a specific output format, one of `senders`, `json` or `table`
`output_format_flags`	Enables `--senders`, `--json` and `--table` options, cannot be set with `output_format`
`display`	Supplies a setting to the typical `--display` option, one of `ok`, `failed`, `all` or `none`
`display_flag`	Enables the `--display` flag on the CLI, cannot be used with `display`
`batch_flags`	Adds the `--batch` and `--batch-sleep` flags
`batch`, `batch_sleep`	Supplies values for `--batch` and `--batch-sleep`, cannot be used with `batch_flags`
`no_progress`	Disables the progress bar`
`all_nodes_confirm_prompt`	A confirmation prompt shown when an empty filter is used

Request Parameters

Every RPC request needs request specified that must have at least agent and action set.

Inputs are allowed as a string hash - equivalent to how one would type inputs on the choria req CLI.

It also accepts a filter option that is the same as that in the discover command.

name: stop
description: Stops the Service gracefully
type: rpc

request:
  agent: service
  action: stop
  inputs:
    service: httpd
  filter:
    classes:
      - roles::apache

Filtering Replies

Results can be filtered using a result filter, this allows you to exclude/include specific replies before rendering the results.

Here’s an example that will find all Choria Servers with a few flags to match versions, it invokes the rpcutil#daemon_states action and then filters results matching a query. Only the matching node names are shown.

name: busy
description: Find Choria Agents matching certain versions
type: rpc

# list only the names
output_format: senders

flags:
  - name: ne
    description: Finds nodes with version not equal to the given
    placeholder: VERSION
    reply_filter: ok() && semver(data("version", "!= {{.Flags.ne}}"))
  - name: eq
    description: Finds nodes with version equal to the given
    placeholder: VERSION
    reply_filter: ok() && semver(data("version", "== {{.Flags.eq}}"))

request:
  agent: rpcutil
  action: daemon_stats

Transforming Results

Results can be transformed data transformations, here’s an example that gets the state of a particular autonomous agent:

name: state
description: Obtain the state of the service operator
type: rpc
transform:
  query: |
        .replies | .[] | select(.statuscode==0) | .sender + ": " + .data.state
request:
  agent: choria_util
  action: machine_state
  inputs:
    name: nats

When run it will just show lines like:

n1-lon: RUN
n3-lon: RUN
n2-lon: RUN