BOSH Toolbelt

Toolbelt is an add-on BOSH release that provides a set of packages that are indispensible in troubleshooting and diagnosing issues on BOSH deployments.

Yes, yes, conventional wisdom holds that you ought not be SSHing into your BOSH VMs to do things, but when systems break down, on-box troubleshooting is often the fastest way to cut through to the heart of the issue.

But first, you need a Toolbelt.

Using the Toolbelt

To outfit your BOSH VMs with awesome tools, first upload Toolbelt to your BOSH director:

bosh target https://192.168.50.4:25555
bosh upload release https://bosh.io/d/github.com/cloudfoundry-community/toolbelt-boshrelease

Then, add the desired toolbelt-* templates to your releases:

instance_groups:
  - name: my-job
    jobs:
    - { release: toolbelt, name: toolbelt }
    - { release: toolbelt, name: toolbelt-quick }
releases:
  - name: toolbelt
    version: latest

Or if you're looking to use toolbelt as a BOSH add-on via runtime-config:

addons:
- name: toolbelt
  jobs:
  - name: toolbelt
    release: toolbelt
  - name: toolbelt-quick
    release: toolbelt
- name: toolbelt-veritas
  include:
    jobs:
    - name: bbs
      release: diego
    - name: rep
      release: diego
    - name: auctioneer
      release: diego
  jobs:
  - name: toolbelt-veritas
    release: toolbelt
releases:
- name: toolbelt
  sha1: 03b0e2136b02819ec59675f3e38edb24de2d92f9
  url: https://bosh.io/d/github.com/cloudfoundry-community/toolbelt-boshrelease?v=3.3.2
  version: 3.3.2

The toolbelt job sets up all users (present and future) on the box to source in the appropriate $PATH, and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables, as well as a colorized prompt that shows you which deployment you are on, what job type, and which instance.o

The toolbelt-quick job pulls in a small subset of useful packages, tuned for a good utility-to-compile-time ratio (hence the 'quick').

Tools On The Belt

The following toolbelt-* jobs exist:

• toolbelt-boss - The Blacksmith CLI, boss
• toolbelt-cf - The Cloud Foundry CLI, cf
• toolbelt-cfdot - The Cloud Foundry Diego Operator Kit, cfdot
• toolbelt-esuf - The ElasticSearch Unassigned Fixer, esuf, for finding and fixigin UNASSIGNED shards on an ElasticSearch cluster (i.e. Logsearch)
• toolbelt-gaol - A CLI for Garden
• toolbelt-gotcha - A small MitM proxy for debugging HTTP APIs that hide behind SSL/TLS.
• toolbelt-jq - jq, it's sed for JSON.
• toolbelt-nload - nload Displays the current network usage
• toolbelt-nats - A utiity for interacting with a NATS messagebus.
• toolbelt-netsniff - The excellent netsniff-ng suite of networking diagnostics tools. LONG COMPILE TIMES
• toolbelt-psql - The PostgreSQL CLI.
• toolbelt-redis - The Redis CLI.
• toolbelt-vault - The Vault CLI, from Hashicorp.
• toolbelt-safe - safe is an alternate client for Vault.
• toolbelt-screen - screen Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes.
• toolbelt-tree - Produce tree-based directory listings.
• toolbelt-tcptrace - Colorized tcpdump packet captures.
• toolbelt-tshark - Terminal-mode Wireshark, for analyzing network protocols at a higher level. LONG COMPILE TIMES
• toolbelt-veritas - The veritas diagnostic tool for the Diego Runtime.

There are some special meta-packages that provide subsets of the above tools, as groups:

• toolbelt-everything - Literally, everything.
• toolbelt-quick - Just the stuff that compiles quickly (i.e. not netsniff, tshark or veritas).

Playing on BOSH-lite

You can create a small, working manifest file from this git repository:

git clone https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/toolbelt-boshrelease
cd toolbelt-boshrelease
./templates/make_manifest warden
bosh -n deploy

Then, you can bosh ssh and see what it is like using Toolbelt!