Install

Requirements

Bossman requires Python >=3.8 and git >=2.3.10.

Windows

Bossman should just about run on Windows, but support as it is will be limited. Extra dependencies may be required (pay close attention to the output on the console when installing via pip).

It is highly recommended to use either the Windows Subsystem for Linux or Docker when running bossman on windows.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux will provide a much smoother than native, but do pay close attention to the warnings on the console.

In both cases (native or WSL), it is strongly recommended to install the Windows Terminal. The default terminal font does not support all the glyphs used by bossman to convey resource status information.

Installing Locally

python3 -m pip install bossman

Using Docker

Bossman provides public docker images which can be convenient if the above requirements are hard to meet.

docker run -it --rm \
   -e TERM=xterm-256color \
   -v ~/.ssh/id_rsa:/home/bossman/.ssh/id_rsa:ro \
   -v $PWD:/work \
   -v ~/.edgerc:/home/bossman/.edgerc ynohat/bossman version

• -i is required to keep standard input open, which is required for displaying progress bars in the terminal

• -t is required to allocate a pseudo-terminal

• -e TERM=xterm-256color gets rich colour output, which is necessary in particular for making the best use of bossman status

• -v ~/.ssh/id_rsa:/home/bossman/.ssh/id_rsa mounts your SSH private key into the container; see notes below

• -v $PWD:/work mounts the current working directory to /work which is the working directory in the container

• -v ~/.edgerc:/home/bossman/.edgerc mounts the Akamai credential file in the appropriate location for bossman to find them

• ynohat/bossman references the Docker repository, however you may wish to target a specific tag.

It is recommended to create a shell alias to avoid typing the above repeatedly!

about mounting your SSH key

Bossman needs to interact with the git remotes, over SSH. Ideally, we would forward the SSH agent socket to docker, but I am failing to get this to work on Mac (and maybe Windows as well). There seems to be an issue with SSH agent socket forwarding when docker is running inside a hypervisor.

As a result, mounting the private key is the only way I can propose for now, along with assurances that bossman will not attempt to steal these credentials.

I cannot however extend the same guarantee to bossman’s dependencies.

If you choose to go forward with mounting your private key as suggested, please make sure you mount the key that you have setup in the git remote, of course.

Important when using docker, the git user.name and user.email are not set globally. Make sure you set them locally in the repository configuration:

git config --local user.name "Jane DOE"
git config --local user.email "Jane.DOE@acme.org"

The docker image also comes with a few other tools that go well with bossman, in particular:

• jq and git

• jsonnet and jsonnetfmt in support of the Jsonnet templating language

• The akamai command, along with the akamai jsonnet plugin which makes it easier to work with Akamai configuration as Jsonnet

• httpie and the httpie-edgegrid authentication plugin