A graphical User interface has the potential ability to guide users on their journey from n00b13 to power user. If a user has never used a system before, the graphical user interface can provide a visual orientation to the system that is intuitive and inviting.

Once a user starts to depend on a system and use it regularly, they often want to automate tasks performed in that system.

I am reminded of these principals as I start making use of my company’s beaker server. I need short term access to machines of various architectures develop and test our Yocto based coding efforts.

We use Beaker to allocate and loan computer hardware. If you want to talk to it via the comand line, you can use the bkr executable. Some of the information comes back as json, but beaker tends to speak xml. To look up a host name from a job, you need to be able to parse the xml. To do that, I used the xq execuable from the python yq package. Yes, x and y.

I installed yq via pip. That puts both the xq and yq executablees into ~/.local/bin.

If i know the job ID, I can parse it using the following syntax.

bkr job-results 'J:5078388' | xq -r  ".job | .recipeSet | .recipe| .task | .[] | .roles | .role | .system | .\"@value\""
hpe-apollo-cn99xx-14-vm-12.khw4.lab.eng.bos.redhat.com
hpe-apollo-cn99xx-14-vm-12.khw4.lab.eng.bos.redhat.com

UPDATE: So here is a useful script that makes use of bkr, jq, and xq to list the hostnames of the hosts I currently have on loan from beaker.

for job in $( bkr job-list -o $USER  --unfinished | jq -r '.[]' ) ; do bkr job-results $job | xq -r  ".job | .recipeSet | .recipe| .task | .[] | .roles | .role | .system | .\"@value\"" ; done