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Comment by tryptophan | Hacker News Reader

I wish Ansible was just a python API. Past a certain point it would be much simpler.

"Its supposed to be state and not a procedure" is BS in my experience. When you need to do IFs, load vars, do things in order anyways...it stops being a state declaration.

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Check out pyinfra: https://pyinfra.com/

I've been been using it for a couple personal projects, and I really like it.

I've tried to move large ansible playbooks to pyinfra and there is no any benefit in the end. pyinfra is also "state"-oriented and for complex cases with logic you have to perform some acrobatics. IMHO switch resulted in the same mess as ansible playbooks.

Note: I am python-fanatic with 15y experience.

What do you mean by "state-oriented"?

Also: complex cases will likely result in complex code. Do you have a viable alternative for this?

https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/2.x/getting-started.html#state-d...

> Do you have a viable alternative for this?

My imperative Fabric 1k line deploy scripts in the past allowed to encapsulate complexity because I had remote state on hands.

That is exactly what it is though. The Ansible CLI is just a client of that API. You can easily interface with the library itself in python

AFAIK Ansible core operates in terms of tasks and plays. The only API it provides is how to construct a list of tasks and how to execute it. One has no remote state/vars at the construction time and has to use "when" or shell logic at execution time as in YAML.

I feel the same way. I feel that I am basically writing shell scripts, but in YAML (and a nice library of idempotent functions). I think Python or she'll would be superior. And if your tool is inferior to shell scripts you are really doing something wrong.

Try pulumi

https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/languages/python/

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