Device Tags

The Foundries.io version of aktualizr-lite includes a concept called “device tags” to help maintain better control of your fleet. Each device can subscribe to a list of tags. If specified, a device will only apply updates from TUF that include a tag from its list.

Lets look at an example targets.json to explain:

{
 ...
 "signed": {
   "targets": {
     "raspberrypi3-64-lmp-143" : {
       "custom" : {
         "createdAt" : "2019-08-12T22:18:16Z",
         "hardwareIds" : ["raspberrypi3-64"],
         "name" : "raspberrypi3-64-lmp",
         "targetFormat" : "OSTREE",
         "updatedAt" : "2019-08-12T22:18:16Z",
         "version" : "143",
         "tags": ["promoted", "postmerge"]
      },
      "hashes" : {
         "sha256" : "20ac4f7cd50cda6bfed0caa1f8231cc9a7e40bec60026c66df5f7e143af96942"
      },
      "length" : 0
     },
     "raspberrypi3-64-lmp-144" : {
       "custom" : {
         "createdAt" : "2019-08-12T22:18:16Z",
         "hardwareIds" : ["raspberrypi3-64"],
         "name" : "raspberrypi3-64-lmp",
         "targetFormat" : "OSTREE",
         "updatedAt" : "2019-08-12T22:18:16Z",
         "version" : "144",
         "tags": ["postmerge"]
      },
      "hashes" : {
         "sha256" : "20ac4f7cd50cda6bfed0caa1f8231cc9a7e40bec60026c66df5f7e143af96942"
      },
      "length" : 0
     }
   }
 }
}

You could have two devices. Device #1 might be used for integration testing. It would set the tags in its sota.toml as:

[pacman]
tags = "postmerge"

In this case, the aktualizr-lite daemon would pick the latest “postmerge” build for this device, version 144.

Device #2 might be used in production. It would set its tag to only run “promoted” builds:

[pacman]
tags = "promoted"

In this case, the aktualizr-lite daemon would pick the latest “promoted” build for this device, version 143.

Managing Tags

By default LMP builds triggered in your factory after code has been merged to master will be tagged with “postmerge”. After doing QA on this build, it can be “promoted” using the fioctl tool:

fioctl targets tag -Tpostmerge,promoted raspberrypi3-64-lmp-144

That will kick off a CI job that will tag build 144 as promoted. This would result in the Device 2 from the example above in updating.