Workspaces

What is generated is commonly referred to as the workspace. The workspace can live anywhere on the filesystem. The default is the current directory. The workspace can also be passed into the linchpin command line with the --workspace (--w) option, or it can be set with the $WORKSPACE environmental variable.

In our simple example, the workspaces is /tmp/simple.

A workspace requires only one file, the PinFile. This file is the cornerstone to LinchPin provisioning. It’s a YAML file, written with declarative syntax. This means the PinFile is written to explain how things should be provisioned after running linchpin up.

Looking at the simple workspace, you’ll see that it has a few other items.

$ pwd
/tmp/simple
$ ls
inventories  PinFile  PinFile.json  README.rst  resources

Ignoring everything but the PinFile for now, it’s clear that other files and directories will exist in a workspace. Let’s have a closer look at the components of a PinFile.