Dobby: a DigitalOcean client

It's a half-baked client for the DigitalOcean API, made to do only and exactly what we need for box management. More interesting is Boxmate:

Boxmate: your FM VM BFF

Boxmate, or box to his friends, is a little command for managing Fastmail VMs. Mostly Fastmail-in-a-Box, but others, too.

To learn more, you should just run box commands and box help ${command} to see up-to-date information. We don't want the README to get woefully out of date, right?

Basically, though, the box command will let you create, destroy, list, and ssh to VMs. More features may come later.

Installing Boxmate

Rik recommends hardcore mode:

1. clone Dobby, Synergy, and Boxmate
2. install them, in that order, "the usual Perl way", by running cpanm --installdeps . && perl Makefile.PL && make install
3. run box

For even better value, get your token securely from 1Password by setting your DIGITALOCAEN_TOKEN environment variable to an opcli URI like this:

DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN=opcli:a=fm:v=Employee:i=xyzzy:f=credential

(For more information on that see his blog post.)

Of course, not everybody likes dealing with all those dependencies, especially when you start getting prompted for LibXML.

Easy mode:

There's a docker/Dockerfile in this repo. A container built with this Dockerfile will have box ready to go in its path. Probably this could be made much slicker, but for now, it should work okay.

Configuring Boxmate

You need two things:

1. a DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN environment variable, preferably with an opcli entry, but potentially with token
2. a valid ~/.boxmate.toml

The TOML file will look like this:

[create]
ssh_key_id = "id_ed25519"
digitalocean_ssh_key_name = "whatever"

The DigitalOcean key name is used to find the SSH key in DO that will be installed as a login key on the box. Generally, this is your unix username.

The ssh_key_id is your local ssh key id that will be used to authenticate with boxes to run setup.