aliasd

aliasd is a go based symlink manager for aliasing utilities that normally would be locally installed to their docker equivalents.

The goal of aliasd is to make the transition from CLI utility to docker command as simple as possible, without introducing unneeded complexity. aliasd achieves this by making aliases simple to define as yaml resources, with as few required changes to workflow as possible.

Adding a proxy

aliasd add -f config.yaml

config.yaml:

resources:
  fpm:
    image: skandyla/fpm
    volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: /data
        hostPath: $(pwd)

Using a proxy

The hostPath above is specified as $(pwd) in order to generate a find and replace of all forwarded args to a proxy command. In other words, if your current working directory is /tmp/test, and you run the following command:

fpm -s dir -t rpm -n "aliasd" -v 0.1 -p $(pwd) -C $(pwd)/rpmbuild ./

./ will be passed as part of the command to docker run, whereas $(pwd) will evaluate to /tmp/test and be replaced with /data per the config file.

Alternatively, the above command could be achieved with the following equivalent command:

aliasd execute -n fpm -s dir -t rpm -n "aliasd" -v 0.1 -p $(pwd) -C $(pwd)/rpmbuild ./

Effectively, the previous command becomes:

docker run --rm -v /path/to/aliasd/examples/fpm/rpm/:/data skandyla/fpm -s dir -t rpm -n aliasd -v 0.1 -p /data -C /data/rpmbuild ./

which may be suitable in the event that ~/.aliasd/bin does not have $PATH precedence.

This shouldn't be too disruptive, as the majority of the tools in most workflows (CMake, Ninja, Make) use absolute file paths by default which in turn means tools consumed by these such as compilers should be easy to support. Additionally, modifying scripts to use $(pwd) instead of ./ where applicable or alternatively changing directory structure to be compatible with both docker run and locally installed utilities may be necessary, but shouldn't at any point be impossible through aliasd: if it is, it is a bug.

Removing a proxy

Removing a locally installed proxy with aliasd is as simple as the following:

aliasd remove -n fpm

This will remove both config files and symlinks if they exist.

Upcoming Features

• client/server aliasd implementation
  • configuration storage in system locations
• kubernetes integration
  • agent configuration where aliasd serves as a proxy for kubernetes API request to create containers capable of executing specific commands
• api versioning