This article will show you how to make drist faster by using it on multiple
servers at the same time, in a correct way.
[What is drist?](https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2018-11-29-drist-intro.html)
It is easily possible to parallelize drist (this works for everything though)
using Makefile. I use this to deploy a configuration on my servers at the same
time, this is way faster.
A simple BSD Make compatible Makefile looks like this:
SERVERS=tor-relay.local srvmail.tld srvmail2.tld
${SERVERS}:
drist $*
install: ${SERVERS}
.PHONY: all install ${SERVERS}
This create a target for each server in my list which will call drist. Typing
`make install` will iterate over `$SERVERS` list but it is so possible to use
`make -j 3` to tell make to use 3 threads. The output may be mixed though.
You can also use `make tor-relay.local` if you don't want make to iterate over
all servers. This doesn't do more than typing `drist tor-relay.local` in the
example, but your Makefile may do other logic before/after.
If you want to type `make` to deploy everything instead of `make install` you
can add the line `all: install` in the Makefile.
If you use GNU Make (gmake), the file requires a small change:
The part `${SERVERS}:` must be changed to `${SERVERS}: %:`, I think that gmake
will print a warning but I did not succeed with better result. If you have the
solution to remove the warning, please tell me.
If you are not comfortable with Makefiles, the .PHONY line tells *make* that
the targets are not valid files.
Make is awesome!