judo

"This simple tool solves X at my org" is probably the most underrated type of project. There's not enough room to overcomplicate something that isn't a core part of the business, it must be practical to maintain, simple&stupid enough so that onboarding is not a hurdle, etc. I encourage everyone to share your "splunk in 1kloc of Python" projects! Some of my own: - https://github.com/rollcat/judo is Ansible without Python or YAML - https://github.com/rollcat/zfs-autosnap manages rolling ZFS snapshots

Oh yes, I've run into this when creating judo[1] (which runs commands/scripts across a fleet of hosts via SSH). It's not even a problem with OpenSSH, the SSH protocol itself (RFC4254[2], Section 6.5) specifies that the command is sent as a string, and there's just no sane way to convert between an array of strings and a string that's also human-friendly to the command line. My work-around was to allow only a single argument in "judo -c CMD HOST", where CMD is to be interpreted by the target's shell. If you need to do anything more complex, the "judo -s SCRIPT HOST" form is more-or-less equivalent to "chmod +x SCRIPT && ./SCRIPT". [1]: http://github.com/rollcat/judo [2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4254

I've written a minimalist replacement for Ansible. It started as a weekend hack, and I'm still using it daily after 7 years. Perhaps it's not technically impressive, but so wasn't the original UNIX, which served as a direct inspiration: how much work can you do with the simplest design and the least amount of code? https://github.com/rollcat/judo

Ansible and YAML were my primary (de)motivators to create Judo (https://github.com/rollcat/judo). This combo is extremely frustrating: for every line in a (hypothetical) shell script that would do one thing, I needed 3-5 (sometimes many more) lines of YAML. Most people on the team who were just getting started with Ansible, would often do half of their work just shelling out. I would usually push to do things "the Ansible way", but even I had to acknowledge the mental overhead of translating back & forth. I think what finally pushed me over the edge was when we started venturing into compose & k8s, and had to mix & juggle YAML+Jinja in two entirely different contexts, each with its own quirks, bugs, gotchas and brain damage. I figured I just need a layer of glue to run shell scripts across a bunch of remote hosts (hence Judo), and otherwi