Re: Swineherd: Guix System container manager

[Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com>]

On 9/13/23 3:06 AM, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> you know the Shepherd: it is an elegant service manager looking after a
> herd of daemons.  Since it can be extended with Guile, I decided to do
> just that to add an extra skill to the Shepherd, turning it into the
> Swineherd.
> 
> The Swineherd is a manager of Guix System containers.  It is implemented
> as a Shepherd service called “swineherd” that lets you manage Guix
> System containers as Shepherd services.  These system container services
> implement a few common features to bring up bridge networking, execute
> commands inside the containers, peek at files, and get simple usage
> stats.
> 
> Swineherd also provides an optional HTTP API server to launch, manage,
> and destroy containers through an HTTP client.  This makes the Swineherd
> useful for building web applications that launch Guix System containers
> on demand.  It comes with an Info manual describing the assumptions, the
> required setup, as well as the implemented commands and the HTTP API.
> 
> The Swineherd was designed to be used with Shepherd on foreign distros,
> so it does not assume to be running on top of Guix System (for better or
> worse).
> 
> You can find the code here:
> 
>      https://github.com/BIMSBbioinfo/swineherd
> 
> Of course the Swineherd is also available as a Guix package called
> “swineherd”.
> 
> If this tickles your interests I’d be very happy to hear your comments
> and incorporate patches to extend it beyond my original requirements.

This is really cool stuff! I'd love to see Guix continue to eat the 
dev-ops space, which, in my opinion, loves to stack complexity on top of 
complexity.

Can you share any ways you're currently using this?

Any plans/interest in hooking it into `guix deploy`?