I'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, although that looks like it might have been addressed in this release.
I 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
This 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.
I switched from Ansible to Pyinfra for my homelab, and continue to use Ansible at work.
The biggest difference is that Pyinfra is simply Python code. It's incredibly easy to control the system in whatever manner you need to. You can probably do the same thing in Ansible, but it's never quite as obvious how to do it. This also means it's much more clear where and why things work the way they do in Pyinfra, where in Ansible I end up digging through numerous role files to try to find where some variable gets injected.
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 can also be good at capturing edge cases with brittle outcomes (especially as ansible went through enormous changes after the red hat acquisition).
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.
The 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.
This 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?
On my homelab. It really feels like a dream come true for my usecase. No more puppet agents. No more declarative syntax, that you have to work around to do basic imperative ways. Or use a module, that stopped being maintained 3 years ago.
Just plop a file here and there through ssh.
Same here, my home lab is all pyinfra. I’m not sure if it’s my previous experience with ansible that made it simple for me or just the relative size of my home lab compared to larger companies where I’ve used ansible - but it seemed much easier to me and easier to follow.
That would have been very useful to me, before I retired! That said, I only run the Hermes Agent on leased VPSs and PyInfra might be a cool and easy to access Hermes - I need to think about that.
I tried something like that, using PyInfra to setup VMs for agent. But gave up, too much complexity for too little gain. Just ask the agent to create a small install script.
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!)
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?
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)
Idempotent operations. Facts gathered from hosts, branched on with normal `if` statements. Real loops, real imports, a real debugger, real type hints. Your editor autocompletes arguments because, brace yourself, they are just function signatures.
About YAML. Wonderful format. For about eleven minutes. Then someone needs an `if`, and you have `{% if %}` inside a string inside a list inside a map. Then someone types `no` as a country code for Norway and it ships to prod as `False`. Then someone indents with a tab and the parser dies without saying where. Congratulations, you reinvented a programming language. Badly. The honest move is to admit you wanted code, then write code.
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.
Ran into some bugs, like one machine that seems to cause errors and mess up the output on restart, although that looks like it might have been addressed in this release.
If it helps, I put together a video when initially exploring PyInfra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_0RiFnKEs
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.
But the main guy who developed it at that company left, so no idea on its longevity.
The biggest difference is that Pyinfra is simply Python code. It's incredibly easy to control the system in whatever manner you need to. You can probably do the same thing in Ansible, but it's never quite as obvious how to do it. This also means it's much more clear where and why things work the way they do in Pyinfra, where in Ansible I end up digging through numerous role files to try to find where some variable gets injected.
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 can also be good at capturing edge cases with brittle outcomes (especially as ansible went through enormous changes after the red hat acquisition).
Dislikes? I had to fight with pyenvs a bit..
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.
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!)
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?
---
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:
Idempotent operations. Facts gathered from hosts, branched on with normal `if` statements. Real loops, real imports, a real debugger, real type hints. Your editor autocompletes arguments because, brace yourself, they are just function signatures. About YAML. Wonderful format. For about eleven minutes. Then someone needs an `if`, and you have `{% if %}` inside a string inside a list inside a map. Then someone types `no` as a country code for Norway and it ships to prod as `False`. Then someone indents with a tab and the parser dies without saying where. Congratulations, you reinvented a programming language. Badly. The honest move is to admit you wanted code, then write code.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.
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