Entities

An entity is something that exists - a "thing", like a VM, or a Container is an entity. OliveTin allows you to then dynamically generate actions based around these entities.

This is really useful if you want to generate wake on lan or poweroff actions for server entities, for example.

A very popular use case that entities were designed for was for container entities - in a similar way you could generate start, stop, and restart container actions.

Entities are just loaded from files on disk, OliveTin will also watch these files for updates while OliveTin is running, and update entities.

Entities can have properties defined in those files, and those can be used in your configuration as variables. For example; container.status, or vm.hostname.

entities:
  - file: /etc/OliveTin/containers.json
    name: container

  - file: /etc/OliveTin/servers.yaml
    name: server

Entity Actions can only be used on Dashboards.

What’s Next?

Now that you understand entities, here’s how to use them effectively: