linux-utils 0.7

Description:

linuxutils 0.7

The Python package linux-utils provides utility functions that make it easy
to script system administration tasks on Linux systems in Python. The
following functionality is currently implemented:

Parsing of the /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab configuration files.
A basic Python API for cryptsetup and a Python implementation of
cryptdisks_start and cryptdisks_stop (with a command line interface).
Atomic filesystem operations for Linux in Python.
Simple network location awareness / discovery.

The package is currently tested on cPython 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 and PyPy
(2.7) on Ubuntu Linux (using Travis CI).


Installation
Usage

cryptdisks-start-fallback
cryptdisks-stop-fallback


History
Contact
License



Installation
The linux-utils package is available on PyPI which means installation should
be as simple as:
$ pip install linux-utils
There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per
user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing
system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so
if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these
instructions 😉.


Usage
For details about the Python API please refer to the API documentation
available on Read the Docs. The Python implementation of cryptdisks_start
and cryptdisks_stop is available on the command line as the following two
programs:


cryptdisks-start-fallback
cryptdisks-stop-fallback


As the names imply these programs are not functional equivalents of their
“official” counterparts, because they only support LUKS encryption and a small
subset of the available encryption options.

cryptdisks-start-fallback
Usage: cryptdisks-start-fallback NAME
Reads /etc/crypttab and unlocks the encrypted filesystem with the given NAME.
This program emulates the functionality of Debian’s cryptdisks_start program,
but it only supports LUKS encryption and a small subset of the available
encryption options.


cryptdisks-stop-fallback
Usage: cryptdisks-stop-fallback NAME
Reads /etc/crypttab and locks the encrypted filesystem with the given NAME.
This program emulates the functionality of Debian’s cryptdisks_stop program,
but it only supports LUKS encryption and a small subset of the available
encryption options.



History
Back in 2015 I wrote some Python code to parse the Linux configuration files
/etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab for use in crypto-drive-manager. Fast
forward to 2017 and I found myself wanting to use the same functionality
in rsync-system-backup. Three options presented themselves to me:

Copy/paste the relevant code
Having to maintain the same code in multiple places causes lower quality code
because having to duplicate the effort of writing documentation, developing
tests and fixing bugs is a very demotivating endeavor. In fact sometime in
2016 I did copy/paste parts of this code into a project at work, because I
needed similar functionality there. Of course since then the two
implementations have started diverging 😛.

Make crypto-drive-manager a dependency of rsync-system-backup
Although this approach is less ugly than copy/pasting the code, it still isn’t
exactly elegant because the two projects have nothing to do with each other
apart from working with LUKS encrypted disks on Linux.

Extract the functionality into a new package
In my opinion this is clearly the most elegant approach, unfortunately it also
requires the most work from me 😇. On the plus side I’m publishing the new
package with a test suite which means less untested code remains in
crypto-drive-manager (which doesn’t have a test suite at the time of
writing).


While extracting the code I shortly considered integrating the functionality
into debuntu-tools, however the /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab parsing
isn’t specific to Debian or Ubuntu at all and debuntu-tools has several
dependencies that aren’t relevant to Linux configuration file parsing.
Since then it has become clear that this was a good choice (not merging the
functionality into debuntu-tools) because linux-utils now provides a Python
implementation of cryptdisks_start and cryptdisks_stop, which is mostly
useful on Linux systems that aren’t based on Debian 🙂.


Contact
The latest version of linux-utils is available on PyPI and GitHub. The
documentation is available on Read the Docs and includes a changelog. For
bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions,
suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.


License
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2020 Peter Odding.