Comment by radiowave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radiowave | Hacker News Reader

This looks very impressive.

Thinking about it as an alternative to scripted workflows with Rundeck, it seems like the main gap here is getting scripts to run on a specific machine without needing to have set that machine up to run worker processes.

(I could be misunderstanding here, because I haven't spotted anything in the docs that talks about the minimum deployment necessary just to allow a particular machine to run workers.)

Really simple example: there's an administrative command on a mailserver, which can be used to create a new mailbox. I want to make that operation part of some workflow. With Rundeck, I can script this and I just have to make sure Rundeck has ssh credentials onto the mailserver; at execution time it'll deploy the script, substitute in whatever variables, run it and capture the output.

I'm not clear on how I would achieve that with Windmill. Would it involve installing Windmill (or some component of it) on the mailserver, and setting it up as an individual worker group?

We have worker groups that would allow you to do exactly this: https://docs.windmill.dev/docs/core_concepts/worker_groups

And you would do exactly what you suggest in the last paragraph

Thanks for the reply. Winmill is definitely something that I'll need to take a closer look at, when time permits. I do suspect though that it's going to be a bit too heavyweight to be a direct replacement for Rundeck.

> And you would do exactly what you suggest in the last paragraph

Assuming you mean this:

> Would it involve installing Windmill (or some component of it) on the mailserver, and setting it up as an individual worker group?

I was looking at Windmill as a replacement for Rundeck as well and this is exactly the point I was trying to figure out too.

I get why you need to install the worker. And there are lots of tools out there to automate this, from putting it in a custom AMI to tools like chef to building it as part of your base container image.

But one thing that's really nice about Rundeck (maybe the only thing) is that you can have it connect to any host and run commands with just some SSH credentials.

It also feels like worker groups maybe work for this use case but aren't the actual intention. Worker groups feel like "this script does some work and I want to make sure it runs on a machine with the resources that it needs to support its work". Whereas Rundeck scripts on remote hosts are more about "I want to run this command on this specific host because I'm doing maintenance on this host."

I guess you could have a script keep a long lived ssh deamon and do this

You could also use the inline script endpoints to ask the worker to execute bash commands directly. But this probably does not compare well to rundeck. If you had time, I'd be very interested to chat and understand what is the optimal experience you'd be looking for: ruben@windmill.dev

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