Does it have an equivalent to konstruktoid's hardening Ansible playbook?
we could put it on our roadmap of examples :-)
PyInfra 3.8.0
21–30 of 110 posts
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a previous job we used it to test our ansible playbooks via molecule, which were part of a CI/CD pipeline to create AWS AMIs. It worked well and was nicer to deal with than test kitchen for testing UNIXy things (is service running and/or enabled, does file have right permissions, does file include $TEXT, etc). It was very useful for us during big linux upgrades, such as when ubuntu went from upstart to systemd. It…
was this before uv? i feel like my pyenv struggles basically ceased once I started using it
I used it between 20016-2023 and since we were not a python shop, I never used any other package managers. It was never an issue with CI/CD pipeline, but iterating locally was always a fight to getting molecule to pick up the right pyenv. It got better towards the end, though.
Honestly the bigger issue was testing x86 docker images on an arm mac, as molecule didn't cleanly support cross platform images and we did pull in x86 binaries for our playbooks (by the end of my time at said company, I was also directly managed by product managers who didn't care about tech debt and I couldn't deal with the otherwise desirable idea to move our compute to ARM - a rant for another day). This may also be fixed now.
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#23There's a video! I can't get over the fact of how suspicious he looks while doing it. And doesn't even cover his face. Crazyness https://x.com/porqueTTarg/status/2047652413306277970 https://xcancel.com/porqueTTarg/status/2047652413306277970
This is spam - btw this is the first spam I have ever come across on hacker news
FWIW, if you turn on "showdead", there is a ton of spam on HN. The mods are just really good.
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#24I used ansible for years and pyinfra is very approachable since it has similar concepts, like inventories, common operations like files.put, server.shell, loving it so far, and it is quite fast
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#25Congrats on shipping 3.8.0!
If you're a software engineer who wants to setup and maintain infrastructure, give PyInfra and Pulumi a go!
Huge fan of PyInfra. For my homelab, I use Pulumi with Python and PyInfra to build fully declarative intent based infrastructure. You can use actual software engineering principles like composition, inheritance, DI to setup and wire your infrastructure and services. One of the benefits of this is your infrastructure and services are now self documenting (have them write out a mermaid diagram!) and easily testable using pytest (from cheap unit tests to extensive integration tests (I use Incus)).
Instead of Pulumi, I originally used Terraform CDK with Python before CDK got IBM'd. The migration to Pulumi was refreshingly painless. My original reason for not choosing Pulumi was the crippled state of the open source, self hosted backend support a decade ago but it looks like that is now way more mature and less crippled.
PyInfra is a breath of fresh air compared to Ansible - its not just fast, it's more Pythonic, so IDE features actually work, readable, maintainable, debuggable. I call it infrastructure for software engineers.
If anyone wants to use an AI agent to try out PyInfra - One issue I've faced is that PyInfra was rearchitected in v2 (and some more in v3?) but what belongs in v1 vs v2 vs v3 isn't very clear, so an AI agent could spend a lot of time writing v1 code, having it fail and iterate to v2 and then to v3.
The official site uses the version in the URL as the namespace but it seems like the SOTA AI agents don't pay much attention to that.
Maybe writing a llms.txt for PyInfra v2, or v3 would be an extremely useful task to help with onboarding newcomers?
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The original post by the OP https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wowi42:
Disclosure: PyInfra core contributor here. We just shipped 3.8.0.
PyInfra is an agentless infrastructure automation tool. Same job description as Ansible, Salt, Chef. SSH into hosts, describe desired state, it diffs and converges. No agent, no central server, no daemon.
The difference: your "playbook" is just Python. Not Python cosplaying as YAML. Not Jinja smuggled inside YAML inside a Helm chart inside a Kustomize overlay. Actual Python:
from pyinfra.operations import apt, files, server
apt.packages(packages=["nginx"], update=True)
files.template(src="nginx.conf.j2", dest="/etc/nginx/nginx.conf")
server.service(service="nginx", running=True, enabled=True)PyInfra skips the eleven good minutes and goes straight to code.
Release notes in the link. Happy to answer questions.
Infrastructure as Code, not infrastructure as YAML.
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#26The is cool, thank you for sharing. I was just thinking about onboarding to ansible since I’ve just been following a manual checklist of commands for my remote server but based on positive feedback here I’ll probs oh give this a shot. Only downside is I imagine LLMs are probably a little more proficient at ansible just due to volume of training data.
I never depend on a models built-in training when using third-party libraries. Providing tons of additional context to the model like a skill, example repos, or context7 snippets that I manually curate is more effort up-front and takes longer, but the results are worth it.
Stuff I threw into the inputs before working with pyinfra
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#27Has anyone used this and ansible and is able to give a short comparison with likes and dislikes?
Pyinfra is what ansible should have been. It's straight python rather than a janky mix of yaml, templates, and bolted-on control flow primitives.
There is this: https://github.com/seantis/suitable
But the main guy who developed it at that company left, so no idea on its longevity.
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#28I've been using PyInfra for a while, albeit just for simple automation (Updating systems, checking certain stats) and I'm a big fan. Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with. Might just be a preference thing, but I always had trouble going through the Ansible docs. Ran into some bugs, like one machine that seems to cause errors and mess up the output on restart, alth…
Glad it clicked. The Ansible vs PyInfra docs gap isn't really preference, YAML plus Jinja plus a custom DSL is just more cognitive load than plain Python with type hints. Once you can grep the source and read it like normal code, going back feels rough.
On the restart bug: if it resurfaces, an issue on GitHub with the OS, connector (ssh/local/docker), and raw output would help a lot. The 3.x line cleaned up a bunch around connection handling and output buffering, so there's a decent chance it's already fixed.
Thanks for the video, will watch. Hands-on intro content is exactly what the project needs more of.
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#29This reminds me of Nortel Command Console back in 2000-2005!
I worked for a telco company that had a lot of Nortel Passport devices (does anyone know what Frame Relay is?). We started changing the network from Nortel to Cisco. Cisco used telnet (later SSH), but Nortel people were extremelly reluctant to switch.
Turns out the Nortel network managment system (nortel nms) had a very interesting feature: you could open the command console to connect to one of the passport devices... or you could connect to a device group (or all the network) and run the same command in all devices.
This was great for auditing which version had every single device in the network... or for changing access-lists globally.
Re: PyInfra 3.8.0
#30This seems cool, I'd particularly be interested if their 10x faster than Ansible claims pan out. Has anyone here used PyInfra? If so what's your experience been like?
I wonder if this is 10x faster than Ansible with ssh multiplexing or not?