While the Formant administrative panel can be used to manually provision and configure devices, a scaling fleet will benefit from automating this process.

Administrator users and service accounts can use fctl to automatically create devices and retrieve new provisioning tokens. The automated provisioning workflow can be used to create new devices, or to re-provision existing devices.

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Installing fctl

This section requires fctl. To install it, see Installing and credentialing fctl.

Recommended usage

• Generating a provisioning token to insert during build-time of a new OS image
• With a provisioning service that uses Formant administrator service account credentials to generate new provisioning tokens for devices in your fleet

Automated provisioning workflow

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Agent re-provisioning may take up to 5 minutes to propagate

When re-provisioning a device, it may take several minutes for the new device credentials to propagate through Formant's servers. At first, the newly re-provisioned agent's requests to Formant servers will fail authentication and will output WARN logs.

After 1-5 minutes, the agent will automatically restart and begin functioning as normal after propagation completes.

1. Verify fctl has administrator credentials

fctl must be credentialed with administrator user or service account credentials to use this automated provisioning workflow.

2. Create or re-provision the device

The following command will create new devices, or re-provision existing devices, and output a valid provisioning token.

fctl create device <device_name> --force --output json | jq -r .provisioningToken

The output of the above command will contain a valid provisioning token for the device. e.g.

$ fctl create device test.001 --force --output json | jq -r .provisioningToken
f57b7a2e0cc932dcd74ecb13145b865e

This provisioning token will last 72 hours before expiring.

3. Set the provisioning token environment variable

Set the FORMANT_PROVISIONING_TOKEN environment variable to the output of the above script.

For instance,

FORMANT_PROVISIONING_TOKEN=$(fctl create device test.002 --force --output json | jq -r .provisioningToken)
echo $FORMANT_PROVISIONING_TOKEN

4. Run the agent installation script

Now, run the native or docker installation with the FORMANT_PROVISIONING_TOKEN environment variable set.

Native installation

bash <(wget -qO - https://app.formant.io/install-agent.sh) $FORMANT_PROVISIONING_TOKEN

Docker installation

bash <(wget -qO - https://app.formant.io/install-agent-docker.sh) $FORMANT_PROVISIONING_TOKEN

Configuring devices automatically

After using the automated provisioning workflow, you may want to automatically configure devices. See Using fctl to configure devices.