Rundeck - How to purge job history

1 Introduction

I love Rundeck, it is a open source software that allow me to automate ad-hoc and routine procedures. Rundeck also has access control, workflow building, scheduling, logging, and etc. In summary, it make my life much easier and allow me to delegate routine operation procedures to others by creating a Rundeck job for them.

One thing I find out missing from the Rundeck is a function to purge job history. It does not make sense to keep old job history forever, but somehow, this feature is just not there. So, I decided to create a Rundeck job to allow me to purge old job history.

2 Prerequisites

2.1 Install xmlstartlet on the Rundeck server

We are going to interact Rundeck with REST API with a script, we need to install xmlstartlet to parse xml data return from Rundeck.

Login to the rundeck server and run the following command:

# wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64//xmlstarlet-1.3.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm # yum install xmlstartlet*.rpm

2.2 Change permission to allow job delete with REST API

On the Rundeck server, edit /etc/rundeck/apitoken.aclpolicy file on the rundeck server and add “delete_execution” like the following (in red color)

description: API project level access control context:  project: '.*' # all projects for:  resource: - equals:     kind: job   allow: [create,delete] # allow create and delete jobs - equals:     kind: node   allow: [read,create,update,refresh] # allow refresh node sources - equals:     kind: event   allow: [read,create] # allow read/create events  adhoc: - allow: [read,run,kill] # allow running/killing adhoc jobs and read output  job: - allow: [create,read,update,delete,run,kill] # allow create/read/write/delete/run/kill of all jobs  node: - allow: [read,run] # allow read/run for all nodes by:  group: api_token_group --- description: API Application level access control context:  application: 'rundeck' for:  resource: - equals:     kind: system   allow: [read] # allow read of system info  project: - match:     name: '.*'   allow: [delete_execution,read] # allow view and delete executions of all projects  storage: - match:     path: '(keys|keys/.*)'   allow: '*' # allow all access to manage stored keys by:  group: api_token_group

2.3 Create an authorization token

Look into the file /etc/rundeck/realm.properties to find out the administrator user ID and password

Log in to the Rundeck GUI using the administrator account that has "admin" credentials. Click on the username in the header of the page, and you will be shown your User Profile page. From this page you can manage your API Tokens. Click "Generate API Token" to create a new one. The unique string that is shown is the API Token.

Now, login to the RunDeck server and create a file to store the token value. For example

$ echo “<token you just created>”  >  /var/lib/rundeck/admin_api_token

3 Shell script for purging the Rundeck job history record

Following is the shell script that that can be used to purge job history. You should create a routine Rundeck job to run this shell script.

#!/bin/bash if [[ $# -ne 2 ]]; then   echo "Usage:"   echo "purge_history <retention days> <api tokent file name>"   exit 1 fi if [[ -f "$2" ]]; then   TOKEN=`cat $2` else   echo "Can not locate $2"   exit 1 fi RETENTION=$1 NODE=localhost echo "Executing purge_job_history for project ${PROJECT} retention ${RETENTION}" date CURL_OUT=/tmp/curl.out.$$ URL="http://${NODE}:4440/api/2/projects" curl -H "X-RunDeck-Auth-Token:$TOKEN" "Content-Type: application/xml"  -X GET "$URL"  2>/dev/null  > $CURL_OUT projects=`xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/result/projects/project" -v name -n $CURL_OUT` purged=0 for PROJECT in $projects do   URL="http://${NODE}:4440/api/2/project/${PROJECT}/jobs"   curl -H "X-RunDeck-Auth-Token:$TOKEN" -o $CURL_OUT -H "Content-Type: application/xml" -X POST "$URL" >/dev/null  2>&1   for JOB in $(xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/result/jobs/job" -m "@id" -v . -n ${CURL_OUT})   do # For each job get the oldest executions URL="http://${NODE}:4440/api/1/job/${JOB}/executions?offset=${RETENTION}" curl -H "X-RunDeck-Auth-Token:$TOKEN" -o $CURL_OUT -H "Content-Type: application/xml" -X GET "$URL" >/dev/null 2>&1 for ID in $(xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/result/executions/execution" -m "@id" -v . -n ${CURL_OUT}) do    URL="http://${NODE}:4440/api/12/executions/delete?ids=${ID}"    echo "#################################################################"    echo "Detelet job $URL"    #echo curl -H "X-RunDeck-Auth-Token:$TOKEN"  -X POST "$URL"  2>&1    curl -H "X-RunDeck-Auth-Token:$TOKEN"  -X POST "$URL"  2>&1    purged=$((purged+1)) done   done done echo "Job executions purged:  $purged"

You can test the script by running the following:

$ chmod +x purge_history.sh $ purge_history.sh 90 /var/lib/rundeck/admin_api_token

Any job history record older than 90 days will be deleted.

4 Reference

• Run job using curl: https://gist.github.com/gschueler/783971
• Rundeck API: http://rundeck.org/docs/api/