cast

README

Cast (Status: Beta)

Cast is an installer tool for any Cast distro like SIFT or REMNUX.

Usage

cast install <owner/repo|alias>

Note: there are only two aliases currently supported, sift and remnux which are resolved to teamdfir/sift-saltstack and remnux/salt-states respectively.

What is a Cast Distro?

Simply put a cast distro is one published by the cast binary, however it's a bit more complicated than that.

The underlying technology used for installing the distro is Saltstack.

There are only two (2) version 1 cast distros out there and they are SIFT and REMnux and what makes them a v1 is the way the release files are generated and signed and how the saltstack files are organized in the repository.

A version 2 cast distro is one like example-distro-saltstack where the salt states start in the root of the project and the release is generated by the cast release. The reason for moving the states to the root is for git submodule usage for distros that extend another distro.

Configuration

Cast is configured via the .cast.yml file in the root of the cast distro project. This configuration is required and contains important information like what GitHub Repository should releases be published to, what the manifest file contents should be.

Part of the configuration is the manifest definition that ultimately gets uploaded as a release asset. The manifest dictates things like base, modes, and supported operating systems.

• name - the name of the distro
• base - (optional) this is the name of the base directory where the saltstack files exist in the project root
• modes - this is a way to define modes that the user can specify along with the default mode, if none is specified
• supported_os - this is a way to define what operating systems are supported

For Developers

If your distro is called alpha then your name should be alpha, all base saltstack states should be based out of the root of the project, however if all the states have to be in a subdirectory, then the base_dir must be set to the name of that subdirectory.

Aliases

Cast has the concept of aliases and it's possible to add additional distros to this alias list.

However the aliases serve a more specific purpose for supporing backwards compatibility for older versions of SIFT and REMnux that were not released as a cast distro originally.

Developers

Developing a distro for cast is very simple, this documentation will walk you through cast initialization.

Saltstack

To make embedding a distro easier in another distro both for the community and for SANS builds purposes, the salt states have now been moved to the root of the project. This allows for a repo to be submoduled into another repo and the manifest.yml dictates to the installer how things should be extracted and installed.

Release

Requirements

• Tag must be created outside of the tool and pushed to the remote
• Cosign private key and public key must be present in the repo

Creating a release has never been more simply. However one thing is required, that you tag and push the tag to GitHub prior to running the command.

git tag v1.0.0 && git push origin --tags

Then you simply run the release command from your local branch.

cast release