3 ms·

Portability is pretty important in the deployment/automation space and it's hard to beat bash in that capacity. It just sucks that bash sucks so much.

by klysm 7y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Ansible already is pretty portable/flexible on target systems (the joys of being agentless and working mostly over SSH). You tend to need python and sometimes some specific modules (python-apt, for instance) on the target, but that's hardly a burden.
- gautamdivgi 7y ago
  I think the Ansible modules can be executable binaries as well. I have heard of modules written in go.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Having written Ansible modules in POSIX sh, I can assure you that this is absolutely the case:) Internally, Ansible modules are just normal executables that expect a very specific set of parameters and return a very specific JSON-encoded format. I believe there's also a newer pure-Python API, but I ignored it after realizing that it was much easier to just use the old one. (... and, of course, I really enjoyed the notion of writing a module in shell)
stevekemp 7y ago
Agreed. Ansible works, but it works so very slowly because it zips and transfers scripts/binaries over to the remote host without caching. I hacked up a simple system, in golang, which uses and SSH connection to run commands and transfer files. Of course I simplified the problem to only really uploading files, running commands, and simple template expansion. For a lot of services where you just need to download a binary and configure a config-file it works well but it's nowhere near as useful as Ansible's module system: https://github.com/skx/deployr/ https://github.com/skx/deployr/
MichaelMoser123 7y ago
bash 4.3 introduced a lot of changes (like addition of declare -n); there are many versions of bash, so it's not something set in stone. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-09/msg00012.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-09/msg00012...
fulafel 7y ago
It's not so cut and dried, eg OS X ships with an ancient bash that's missing many features, and of course many operating systems (eg BSDs, Windows) and Linux distributions don't include bash by default.

Portability is pretty important in the deployment/automation space and it's hard to beat bash in that capacity. It just sucks that bash sucks so much.

by klysm 7y ago

Portability is pretty important in the deployment/automation space and it's hard to beat bash in that capacity. It just sucks that bash sucks so much.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

Ansible already is pretty portable/flexible on target systems (the joys of being agentless and working mostly over SSH). You tend to need python and sometimes some specific modules (python-apt, for instance) on the target, but that's hardly a burden.

gautamdivgi 7y ago
I think the Ansible modules can be executable binaries as well. I have heard of modules written in go.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Having written Ansible modules in POSIX sh, I can assure you that this is absolutely the case:) Internally, Ansible modules are just normal executables that expect a very specific set of parameters and return a very specific JSON-encoded format. I believe there's also a newer pure-Python API, but I ignored it after realizing that it was much easier to just use the old one. (... and, of course, I really enjoyed the notion of writing a module in shell)

stevekemp 7y ago

Agreed. Ansible works, but it works so very slowly because it zips and transfers scripts/binaries over to the remote host without caching. I hacked up a simple system, in golang, which uses and SSH connection to run commands and transfer files. Of course I simplified the problem to only really uploading files, running commands, and simple template expansion. For a lot of services where you just need to download a binary and configure a config-file it works well but it's nowhere near as useful as Ansible's module system: https://github.com/skx/deployr/ https://github.com/skx/deployr/

MichaelMoser123 7y ago

bash 4.3 introduced a lot of changes (like addition of declare -n); there are many versions of bash, so it's not something set in stone. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-09/msg00012.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-09/msg00012...

fulafel 7y ago

It's not so cut and dried, eg OS X ships with an ancient bash that's missing many features, and of course many operating systems (eg BSDs, Windows) and Linux distributions don't include bash by default.