Controlling Warewulf (wwctl)

Warewulf’s command-line interface is based primarily around the wwctl command. This command has sub-commands for each major component of Warewulf’s functionality.

  • configure configures system services that Warewulf depends on

  • container configures containers (node images)

  • kernel configures override kernels

  • node manages nodes in the cluster

  • profiles defines configuration which can be applied to multiple nodes

  • overlays manages nodes

  • power turns nodes on and off

  • ssh provides basic parallel ssh functionality

All of these subcommands (and their respective sub-subcommands) have built-in help with either wwctl help or --help.

Hostlists

Many of the commands (e.g., wwctl node list support a “hostlist” syntax for referring to multiple nodes at once. Hostlist expressions support both ranges and comma-separated numerical lists.

For example:

  • node[1-2] expands to node1 node2

  • node[1,3] expands to node1 node3

  • node[1,5-6] expands to node1 node5 node6