One of the main benefits of using Wallaby for configuration is the remote-access API. Because the API is comprehensive and usable from any language with a QMF binding (including C++, Java, Python, and Ruby), it provides developers and users with the means to build tools, policies, templating systems, and one-off scripts on top of Wallaby.

If you’re writing a Wallaby API client in Ruby, you can use a couple of nice features to ease development: the Wallaby client library, which presents a more polished interface than dealing with raw QMF queries and calls, and the wallaby console utility, which connects to a specified broker and gives you a Ruby REPL that has a global variable pointing to a store client — perfect for casual, interactive experimentation.

Use the same global command line options for wallaby console as you’d use for any other wallaby subcommand: specifying host, port, and authentication information for the broker. Once you’ve started it up, you’ll be dropped into a Ruby prompt where Wallaby::store is a reference to a client proxy object for your Wallaby store. You can then inspect or modify any entity that the store knows about; the store object has accessors called nodes, features, parameters, etc., that return arrays of each kind of object. Then you can invoke methods on each object. The transcript below shows a session in which the user inspects some details of a node in a trivial pool:

>> Wallaby::store.nodes.map {|n| n.name}
=> ["frotz"]
>> frotz = Wallaby::store.nodes[0] ; nil
=> nil
>> Wallaby::store.groups.map {|g| g.name}
=> ["+++DEFAULT", "+++af413ebf1de0f9d4253eb89717a4e13b"]
>> Wallaby::store.groups[1].features
=> ["DisablePreemption"]
>> frotz.getConfig
=> {"PREEMPT"=>"FALSE", "WALLABY_CONFIG_VERSION"=>"1284180448517726"}

In the future, it will be easier to extend the wallaby command with your own subcommands. For now, however, wallaby console provides a great way to interact with the Wallaby API.

(Cross-posted from Chapeau.)