Overview¶

Squadron helps you deploy and configure your software. It grabs your software, sets it up right, starts it up, and has built-in tests to make sure this goes off without a hitch.

Squadron is good for:

Deploying complex websites
Releasing your new software-as-a-service application
Deploying testing and production versions of your code
Testing your configuration

The basic process of using Squadron is: make a Squadron repo, configure your service after learning how Squadron works, commit your changes, and then run squadron on your servers.

Features¶

Squadron has a bunch of features to help you download, configure, and test your software and its dependencies.

Multiple ways to get your code¶

With Squadron, you can download binaries, download tarballs of your code, grab your source with git. With apt, virtualenv, and npm support, you can get your code’s dependencies.

After grabbing your code, Squadron can run Built-in Tests and use Atomic Deployments to deploy your code.

Easy dependency management¶

Squadron supports apt, npm, and pip via virtualenv, and we’re always adding more. Adding a new package to install is super easy, and you can have different packages in different Environments.

Easy Templating¶

Squadron uses a simple templating library called Quik to write configuration templates. They look like this:

[log]
debuglog = @loglevel rotatinglog @logdir 5000 5
#if @output:
outputlog = DEBUG stderr
#end

This is used to write out your configuration files for your software. Values are set through defaults and service configurations and can be different for different Environments.

Atomic Deployments¶

Did you know that deploying your code takes time? And during that time your users might get inconsistent results? Why bother with that headache. Deploy your code atomically!

Squadron can easily deploy your code atomically via a symlink so that its either all the new version or doesn’t reflect any changes at all.

Environments¶

You want to have a development and production environments? Easy. You want to have six different QA environments? Done. You need two production environments for A/B testing? Trivial.

Environments are easy with Squadron.

Built-in Tests¶

Squadron has two types of built-in tests: automatic tests you don’t have to write, and an easy framework for testing your deployed code.

If you write a JSON file as part of a template, Squadron will check to make sure it’s a valid JSON file. In the future, XML files written out by templates will be similarly checked, and if they have a schema, that will be verified.

The second type of tests are the kind you write because you know your service. Do you write a PHP script to hit a URL? Or a simple bash script to check if your service is running? Whatever you want, we’ll run it.

Rollback¶

What if your deployment goes wrong?

With traditional configuration management software, it’s difficult or impossible to rollback to exactly how it was before the deployment. With Squadron, that’s built-in.

No programming¶

And, maybe best of all, there’s no programming involved. There’s no Domain Specific Language to learn. It’s all just config that is rigorously checked by Squadron when you run it.

No programming means less testing and little to no debugging so you can get what you want done faster and easier.

Open source¶

Squadron is open source software written in Python. Our project source and issue tracker is on Github. If you’d like to contribute, please do!

You can get in touch with us via email, on Twitter or via IRC:

irc.freenode.net #squadron

We’d love to hear from you!

Sound good?¶

Does it sound like Squadron fits your use case? If so, head on over to the Getting Started section and try Squadron out!