Crate tricorder

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Automation the KISS way.

Introduction

Ansible is a great tool for automation. But it suffers from the same problem of many such tools: a big pile of custom YAML DSL.

YAML is used to provide a declarative syntax of your automated workflow. This is nice for simple use cases, but automation can become rather complex very quickly.

Then those tools implement control flow structures (conditional execution, loops, parallelization, …), then the ability to save values into variables.

Before you know it, you’re programming in YAML. And the developer experience of such a language is terrible.

tricorder aims to fix this. It gives you a single tool to perform tasks on multiple remotes. You then use your common UNIX tools like bash, jq, curl, etc… to compose those tasks together.

About tricorder

The name comes from Star Trek’s Tricorder, a multifunction hand-held device to perform sensor environment scans, data recording, and data analysis. Pretty much anything required by the plot.

The main goal of tricorder is to provide the basic tools to perform tasks on remote hosts and get out of your way. Allowing you to integrate it with any scripting language or programming language of your choice, instead of forcing you to develop in a sub-par custom YAML DSL.

Modules

  • Command Line Interface to tricorder capabilities.
  • Core features of tricorder.
  • Available tricorder tasks.