I just know I have a Debian box somewhere…

Do you have more than π boxes? Are you constantly forgetting about them?

With Box you can easily:

• Keep inventory of your boxes:

    $ box ls
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
  

• Check if they're up:

    $ box uptime
    [email protected] | 15:29:49 up 24 days, 3:07, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
    [email protected] | 3:29PM up 17 days, 3:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.20, 0.14, 0.09
    [email protected] | 3:29PM up 42 days, 1:44, 15 users, load averages: 1.30, 1.94, 1.88
  

• Remind yourself what you put in those boxes:

    $ box id
    [email protected] | Linux foo 3.5.0-17-generic i686
    [email protected] | NetBSD bar 6.0.1 amd64
    [email protected] | Linux quux 2.6.34-generic amd64
  

All this and more, for the low price of nothing! Get Box today!

Box is a remote command execution program. Box allows you to run commands on all of your servers and presents the produced results in a readable format.

Box is liberally licensed with the ISC license.

In the future, Box will likely morph into a minimal configuration management system.

Box is designed for managing at most twentyish boxes. If you have a larger deployment, we recommend that you use tools like Ansible, Salt Stack, Chef or Puppet (in roughly increasing order of complexity).

• A POSIX /bin/sh implementation on boxes and on the controlling machine.
• Access to boxes with an SSH key.
• Box runs commands in parallel on each box if GNU Parallel is installed.

Box doesn't have a an installation method yet. You can run it easily from a Git clone, though:

git clone [email protected]:wolverian/box.git
cd box
echo [email protected] >> etc/hosts
echo [email protected] >> etc/hosts
PATH=bin:$PATH
box tasks
…
box id
…

Box requires that you use SSH keys for authentication.