Is Rex dying?

<2018-08-26 Sun>

Rex is a deployment and configuration management tool, like Ansible being. Here are its advantages from its official website:

• Uses ssh, no agent required
• Seamless integration, no conflicts
• Easy to use and to extend
• Easy to learn, it‘s just plain Perl

What I love most is the last one, "just plain perl", which makes it more flexible. If you hate stereotype configuration files like me, you should try it.

But unfortunately, things I don't expect happen around it:

• Development is under a low activity;
• Offical website was down for a time(being up now);
• Modules repository(https://modules.rexify.org) is broken: 1185, 1201.

The break of the modules repository is really the worst one. It indeed casts a damper to the usage: users could not install any extension module by rexify --use before it is fixed. (There's a working-around, please read on.)

With all these being seen, the consequential question comes out: Is Rex dying?

I hope not, and it is actually not.

Ferenc Erki, one of the Rex maintainers, said on the mail list of Rex-User:

… I personally don't consider rex as a dead project, despite the low activity. I wish I could work on it more, but it proves to be hard to find the quality time simply because life happens (in chronological order: being knocked out of tech for a year due to burnout, changing jobs, moving to a another city hundreds of kilometres away, getting married, selling/renovating flats in another country).

In fact, I started to organize an open source contribution meetup locally so I have some dedicated time to work on non-paid open source stuff again (mostly rex) in a managed fashion. So at least once a month I'm sitting down and going through open issues and pull requests. Plus I committed a contribution guide earlier this year that should make many workflows around the project smoother.

Maintaining all the surrounding additional stuff (website, CI, build pipelines, repos, etc. + sister projects like repositorio and rex-recipes + support over IRC/mailing list) are currently beyond me. If anyone is interested in helping out, I'm happy to discuss ideas and review code.

All help are welcome :)

…

So some guys are still fighting there and we will probably see its resuscitation someday.

If you are, like me, using Rex now, or are trying to use it, here's a working-around for the modules installation, install from the source:

$cd $PROJECT_HOME
$ls
Rexfile
$mkdir lib -p
$git clone https://github.com/RexOps/rex-recipes.git
$git -C rex-recipes checkout 1.4  # ensure rex-recipes is on branch 1.4
$ln -sf $PWD/rex-recipes/Rex/ lib/
$ls
lib  Rexfile  rex-recipes

After that, all the extension modules in rex-recipes are installed.