PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out

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.

If it helps, I put together a video when initially exploring PyInfra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_0RiFnKEs

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.

I'm glad to see PyInfra is still under active development. I don't currently use PyInfra, but I previously used it for a couple years to manage a build farm of about 100 Mac Pros. Those machine had previously been partially managed by Chef to ill effect.

I found PyInfra to be a great tool for the job at hand. Even though it didn't have many of the operations I needed, I found it easy to write new operations specific to macOS management tasks.

I recently looked at it again to help build EC2 Mac AMIs in combination with Packer, but I ended up with pydoit this time instead.

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

I have started to adapt https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which looks similar in style to this from the verification side. Having previously used Salt, Ansible, and Chef at other companies, this looks great from a UX perspective compared to those other tools.

Has anyone used this and ansible and is able to give a short comparison with likes and dislikes?

Is there anything like Ansible Tower or Semaphore for PyInfra? Or some more generic tool that would work similarly?

I could likely vibecode something up if I had to, but I'm interested in a job orchestration system that can run things like upgrades, scheduled backups, ideally with a nice dashboard showing successful/failed jobs.

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 tried ansible before and hated it, this idea is genius.

This looks great! pyinfra will integrate better with my other code, and installing it with uv fits my workflow better. Thanks for the post. I'll give it a try. I think some of my Caprover initialization tasks could also be handled by pyinfra.

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.

Never heard of this before. In looking through docs, honestly it looks like Ansible, but for people who don’t know Ansible, and with way more footguns. The fact that you can import any existing Python library means you’re now relying on those libraries to not introduce bugs, or throw an exception in the middle of an operation, etc.

I despise YAML, but I can appreciate that it makes it harder to introduce imperative logic, and it forces you to stay on the paved path - which is very well-tested.

Does it have an equivalent to konstruktoid's hardening Ansible playbook?

See lots of comparisons to Ansible but Chef/puppet (both of which have agent-less modes) in Python instead of Ruby is what immediately came to mind. I guess Salt as well technically.

The amount of repetition of @override seems unpythonic to me, but maybe that's python being unpythonic.

https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra/blob/3.x/src/pyinfra/...

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.

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?

How does this compare to Salt Stack?

“Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Use Salt to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of your infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.”

https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/about_salt_proj...

Congrats 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)

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.

There'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