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Comment by badman_ting | Hacker News Reader

Every time I go to write a shell script I'm like "do I need to put quotes around this variable to interpolate it? How do I do looping again?" then I give up and use Python or Perl or something.

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I guess you could load your favorite language runtime. That sounds like a one line change. In your shell script. Which is the point. I'm betting at some point you look back and realize that much of your config doesn't need a secondary language.

How would you take a template file, fill in some values, copy it to a certain path on the server and give it the right permissions? With, say, Python, I'd have to read the file, using mako or jinja to fill in the values, scp the file to some temporary file, then somehow run Python code on the server using SSH to copy the file and give it the right permissions.

With Ansible, this is a single line.

Let's see... I would take the template file, fill in some values, scp it up to it's final location on the server, and run chmod on the server.

I guess I could learn the "one-line" ansible way to do it, but I'd also have to learn to set up ansible. And I'm guessing it's not as flexible as, say, shell scripts.

The cool thing about Ansible is that there's no set up. You install it, write the config and run "ansible-playbook <config>". It connects to the nodes using SSH and runs without having to be installed in them.

As for not being as flexible as shell scripts, I'd say that's technically impossible, since it has a command for running shell scripts :) Personally, I never had to use it, but it's there.

At my workplace, we just coined the phrase 'tickslexic' for when you can't remember what type of quotation character to use.

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