mellow-skunk

Mellow Skunk is a django-rest application for mellow collectors such as mellow-heeler and mellow-hyena. Mellow Skunk provides a easy mechanism to share the most recent results of a collection cycle. Mellow Skunk also exposes collection metrics to prometheus by using django-prometheus.

There is only one skunk instance per host and it exposes statistics for all collection operations on the host.

deployment

Mellow collector hosts are all based on Raspberry Pi. The mellow skunk application is distributed via github and expected to reside at /home/gsc/Documents/github/mellow-skunk, and this path is hard coded in many scripts.

The django-rest application executes from gunicorn invoked by systemd(1), and should always be available.

nginx(8) acts as a reverse proxy to gunicorn and is also started by systemd(1), and should always be available.

operation

Once mellow skunk has been installed and configured, the collection applications can post a JSON payload for each collection cycle. All previous results will be deleted and only the freshest content will be retained. Also, the prometheus gauge for collection population will be updated. The uploaded content can be reviewed w/a GET at the URL below.

installation

1. Clone mellow skunk repo within /home/gsc/Documents/github
   • Scripts are expecting application at /home/gsc/Documents/github/mellow-skunk
2. Establish python environment
   • cd mellow-skunk/src/django-rest
   • Invoke virtualenv, i.e. virtualenv -p /usr/local/opt/python@3.9/bin/python3.9 venv
   • source venv/bin/activate
   • pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Verify you can start django
   • cd mellow
   • python manage.py migrate
   • python manage.py runserver
4. Verify you can run mellow skunk with gunicorn
   • gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 mellow.wsgi
5. Configure systemd(1) to invoke gunicorn
   • cd ..;ls (you should see two gunicorn.* files)
   • sudo cp gunicorn.* /etc/systemd/system
   • sudo systemctl start gunicorn.socket
   • sudo systemctl enable gunicorn.socket
   • sudo systemctl status gunicorn.socket
   • curl -v --unix-socket /run/gunicorn.sock localhost
     • should see a JSON payload from skunk
   • sudo systemctl status gunicorn
6. Configure nginx(8) reverse proxy
   • Install nginx(8) if not already present
     • sudo apt-get install nginx
   • cp reverse-proxy.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available
   • ln /etc/nginx/sites-available/reverse-proxy.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
   • rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
   • sudo systemctl restart nginx
7. mellow-skunk should now be responding at http://localhost

configuration

1. Define the host.
   • Example curl-host-rpi3d-post.sh
2. Define a task.
   • Example curl-task-heeler-post.sh

URL

URL	Verb	Payload
/heeler/	get, post	JSON Example
/host	get, post	JSON
/hyena/	get, post	JSON Example
/groups	get	JSON
/metrics	get	Prometheus Text Example
/poodle/	get, post	JSON
/task/	get, post	JSON
/users	get, post	JSON

Relevant Links

• django, nginx, gunicorn
• django prometheus
• django rest example
• django rest tutorial
• django rest repository
• monitor django w/prometheus
• python client_python