Ask HN: Is there any replacement to Ansible? I hate the DSL
Hey ,
I use Ansible alot and I just hate it's DSL I working with it and don't understand why I need to struggle with it
Any replacements that I can use real programing that is agentles?
Ansible means yaml, and yaml reminds me of perl. But not in a fun nostalgic way. Like Perl, yaml has too many "intuitive" features that you never actually use but will for sure be learned, by you, in a hurry, when you typo.
Tbh Nixos is what I use instead of Ansible -- you just open Terminator or xargs or do a plain for-loop in a bash script equivalent, open as many ssh connections as you need, and in each, do a one-liner to git-pull the latest conf repo, and then do `nixos-rebuild switch`.
Rollbacks are just as simple, and the whole thing is idempotent.
Of course you have to have control over which OS is in use, but that's a good reason to advocate for Nixos in your workplace.
The declarative nix language also quite a journey to learn, but when you get it, nothing else will feel good enough again.
Remember to get the treesitter grammar if your editor supports it. I think there is a language server too
And also depending on what you're using Ansible for, you may also be able to use Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/