Disclosure: PyInfra core contributor here.<p>We just shipped 3.8.0.<p>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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> 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)
</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>PyInfra skips the eleven good minutes and goes straight to code.<p>Release notes in the link. Happy to answer questions.<p>Infrastructure as Code, not infrastructure as YAML.
Thank you for this. I've implemented my own version of this a couple times over the previous 25 years. This is how my code always looked.<p>I've used Salt, CFEngine, Chef, Puppet, Make, Bash, and many hand-rolled iterations of this approach. I finally threw in the towel and forced myself to come to terms with Ansible and it's quirks because I needed the wider community support.<p>Now with AI tooling, I'm not so convinced the community modules moat is an actual moat. I'm going to very seriously consider porting all my Ansible code to this and see how it feels. I anticipate I'll be much happier after the change.<p>Do you have any plans to integrate with/build on other communities modules? i.e. even if it's not perfect, being able to call Ansible or Salt modules from PyInfra would be one way to fill the gap.
> Infrastructure as Code, not infrastructure as YAML.<p>Right on.<p>It's amazing to me that we've spent decades with programming languages and environments which can accurately guess what you're about to type next, which have enormous expressiveness while maintaining cogency, which are intuitive and well understood by humans, which have endless libraries and an infinity of ways of connecting with the world.<p>And what do we use to configure the most sophisticated infrastructure to run such code? Yet another mark-up language!
Many domains are better served by a more limited programming language, so you can analyze a program and/or make guarantees about it.<p>Real regexes (actually regular…) are infinitely better than Python code matching the same string (if they are sufficient) - you can compute their intersection, union, complement; check if they can match anything at all (and generate an example automaticallly).<p>For software builds, Bazel and others use Starlark, which is a restricted Python subset, so builds can be guaranteed finite and can be reasoned about.<p>Ansible may or may not offer any benefits in return for the limits (I am not an ansible guru), but in general, most tasks do not need a Turing complete configuration/specification language - and it is then better to NOT have Turing completeness.
As a heads-up, your comments here were flagged. I think some people must have thought your (current) writing style rather LLM-ish.
It obviously was LLM assisted, but I think collectively we will have to get over our distaste for text that has some LLM’isms in spots as long as it isn’t obviously completely outsourced to a bot, unless we just want to shut down message boards completely.
Ah shit...
The problem is that it is actually not just Python, branched with “normal if statements”: <a href="https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/deploy-process.html#checking-operation-changes" rel="nofollow">https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/deploy-process.html#checking...</a>
You can write `if CHECK: do something`. There's nothing preventing that.<p>I've been down this path, implemented my own version of PyInfra many times over the years. I've used Ansible and my own implementations in anger. The _if param is far far far from the worst offender and it's a natural addition, especially when you are laying out a bunch of unrelated checks into something that looks more like a table.
This! Been trying to find the best (least worst) solution to this since 2015 when I started pyinfra. Done ast parsing/hacking, done weird context managers instead, tried rewriting statements to context managers. _if is the latest, and I think least worst, option right now.<p>Basically a flaw of the entire model where you write code as if executing a single host which is then executed on many in parallel, forcing the two step diff and deploy that causes this.<p>Funny thing is since v3 this behavior (diff then execute) is even desired with the yes prompt like terraform.
Yeah, but I have Claude Code or Codex do this Ansible stuff and they do just fine with all this and then there's a gazillion of examples that they can lean on and once the patterns are established, it's pretty smooth. Opus 4.5 was when the big inflection was I was heavy into automation all summer. It was Opus 4.0. It was like pulling teeth. And then when 4.5 came out, it was just beautiful.
"I only use tools that my LLM knows how to use" is not the flex that you think it is
Yeah, you’re gonna eat your words when you do something that’s not “install this package” and “create this user”.<p>For anything dynamic and sufficiently complicated, ansible is horrible. Pyinfra is much better.
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.<p>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.<p>If it helps, I put together a video when initially exploring PyInfra: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_0RiFnKEs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_0RiFnKEs</a>
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.
Really need to try PyInfra, the concept sounds nice.<p>You don't have to do crazy things with Ansible for that yaml DSL becoming the opposite of helpful. Things which would be quite straightforward to express in code become quite cumbersome, hard to understand and hard to debug. Also Jinja is often a horrible choice (you don't have in Ansible). Also Ansible excessively requires it in places where you want proper types and not just a string.
Pyinfra creator here - thank you so much for all the kind words, really means a lot to myself and the other maintainers, feeling the love.
Has anyone used this and ansible and is able to give a short comparison with likes and dislikes?
I switched from Ansible to Pyinfra for my homelab, and continue to use Ansible at work.<p>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 <i>how</i> 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.
Just having "home/docker.py" instead of "collections/ansible_collections/home/dev/roles/docker/tasks/main.yml" is reason enough. Which one of the 300 main.yml files do I load when doing a quick open in any modern text editor?
The worst part of Ansible is data manipulation, what would be an easy dictionary operation in Python is a huge mix of lookups in Ansible.<p>Incredibly frustrating that the data you want is <i>right there</i> but you can't easily grab it.
If Jinja templating for data manipulation gets too complex or inconvenient, you can create your own module in ansible and use python code for data manipulation. But at this point you are better served with plain python which I think is where pyinfra should shine. I want to take a look though at how hard it is to implement your own module for it.
If you're doing data manipulation with server state, you would probably want to create a Fact[0]. This is a straightforward Python class.<p>If you're doing data manipulation locally you would simply write Python code.<p>Operations[1] are Python functions which execute (yield) commands which will be run on hosts.<p>That's the gist of what it takes to write custom modules for Pyinfra.<p>[0] <a href="https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/facts.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/facts.html</a>
[1] <a href="https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/operations.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/operations.html</a>
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.
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.<p>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).<p>Dislikes? I had to fight with pyenvs a bit..
I used ansible for building simple logging appliance (something like Elasticsearch + Dashboards + other tooling) and I found it very difficult to reason with specifically python code snippets within YAML.<p>Switched to Pyinfra and the difference is day and night. You write python code you can organise your stuff into functions, classes and whatever you like and then instantiate them as you like. Highly reusable configuration.<p>You have full pwoer such as you can call boto to fetch the list of servers to target, filter base on tags and what not. Only sky is the limit because it is NOT a DSL (or YAML) rather full blow real python.
Ansible includes modules to handle cloud resources as well, such as AWS Lambda.
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
What I really want is something like either ansible or this that:<p>- Doesn't unnecessarily send code over the network.<p>- Has some sort of "execution optimizer".<p>Think for example a query planner/optimizer of a db. Or, as a good example, the query planner of the polars framework as opposed to how it works in pandas.<p>If I do a for loop and each loop iteration copies a file into the same dir, the optimizer should catch that and send over one compressed tar file.
Does this abstract over the package management systems (apt, yum , apk etc.)?
Or do we still have to write distro specific install commands?
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.<p>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.<p>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 have started to adapt <a href="https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/" rel="nofollow">https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/</a>, 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.
This reminds me of Nortel Command Console back in 2000-2005!<p>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 <i>extremelly</i> reluctant to switch.<p>Turns out the Nortel network managment system (nortel nms) had a very interesting feature: you could open the command console to connect to <i>one</i> of the passport devices... or you could connect to a device group (or all the network) and run the same command in all devices.<p>This was great for auditing which version had every single device in the network... or for changing access-lists globally.
Is there anything like Ansible Tower or Semaphore for PyInfra? Or some more generic tool that would work similarly?<p>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.
i tried ansible before and hated it, this idea is genius.
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.
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.<p>Stuff I threw into the inputs before working with pyinfra<p><a href="https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra-examples" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra-examples</a><p><a href="https://context7.com/websites/pyinfra" rel="nofollow">https://context7.com/websites/pyinfra</a>
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.
Does it have an equivalent to konstruktoid's hardening Ansible playbook?
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?
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.
I wonder if this is 10x faster than Ansible with ssh multiplexing or not?<p><a href="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Multiplexing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Multiplexing</a>
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.
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.<p>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.
That was why any moderate to large Chef installation always turned out to be such a nightmare in practice - it was so easy to break out of the DSL, so people ended up swaddling it in impenetrable, unmaintainable spaghetti code. Ansible was a real breath of fresh air when it first came along!<p>This is just the pendulum swinging back again, and at least Python tends to be a little less "clever" (and therefore less write-only) than Ruby.<p>It seems to me that infra management is inherently suited to declarative logic. I'm pragmatic enough to understand why SWEs with little infra experience might prefer an imperative approach, but I tend to think you should pick one or the other and stick to it. In my experience, hybrid systems end up combining the worst aspects of both.
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The amount of repetition of @override seems unpythonic to me, but maybe that's python being unpythonic.<p><a href="https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra/blob/3.x/src/pyinfra/facts/docker.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra/blob/3.x/src/pyinfra/...</a>
How does this compare to Salt Stack?<p>“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.”<p><a href="https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/about_salt_project.html#about-our-sponsors" rel="nofollow">https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/about_salt_proj...</a>
salt is heavy: it has client, server, agent. it equires installation, consumes resources, etc.<p>pyinfra is just python that gets transpiled into ssh commands
Congrats on shipping 3.8.0!<p>If you're a software engineer who wants to setup and maintain infrastructure, give PyInfra and Pulumi a go!<p>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)).<p>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.<p>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 <i>for</i> software engineers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Maybe writing a llms.txt for PyInfra v2, or v3 would be an extremely useful task to help with onboarding newcomers?<p>---<p>The original post by the OP <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wowi42">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wowi42</a>:<p>Disclosure: PyInfra core contributor here.
We just shipped 3.8.0.<p>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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> 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)</code></pre>
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.<p>PyInfra skips the eleven good minutes and goes straight to code.<p>Release notes in the link. Happy to answer questions.<p>Infrastructure as Code, not infrastructure as YAML.
There is a PR open for llms.txt and llms-full.txt. We'll try to merge it soon!<p>Disclosure: another contributor here.
It's amazing to see more contributors!<p>TBH, I was worried a few years ago that there was basically just one (original) contributor. This now gives me added trust that I'm taking the right decision to lean heavily into it.<p>I hope more people start using pyInfra.<p>Thank You for your contribution and attention!
Indeed! (I am that original contributor :)), lots of work ongoing to address this, we now have a small maintainers group and are sharing out review and release loads.
Nick, Yes Indeed! I sent you a fanmail Sun, Aug 3, 2025, 11:06 AM PST to your n..fizzadar.com email.<p>If you're reading this, I'll indulge and reask you the two questions:<p>- question 1: There's clearly a demand for a "Python as a DSL" for infrastructure projects - CDKTF/Python, CDK/Python, Pulumi, cdk8s etc are very popular. I would have imagined pyinfra to be <i>way</i> more popular and ubiquitous than it really is! Do you have thoughts on why pyinfra isn't more popular? How do people typically discover pyinfra? I would imagine <i>any</i> Python dev would intuitively grab pyinfra over Ansible?<p>- question 2: Do you have any thoughts about cdk8s? As you know well, Kubernetes has similar YAML "hell," and as someone who spends significant resources on pyinfra, I would guess you have given <i>something</i> like cdk8s thought?<p>I'm happy to engage either over email or here, don't have a preference.<p>Again, Thank You for building and sharing pyInfra.
Thanks!<p>There are currently 3 active maintainers incl. the creator of pyinfra. But there are many more contributors incl. repeat contributors.
+100 to pulumi, I love it with TypeScript
There's a video!<p>I can't get over the fact of how suspicious he looks while doing it. And doesn't even cover his face. Crazyness<p><a href="https://x.com/porqueTTarg/status/2047652413306277970" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/porqueTTarg/status/2047652413306277970</a>
<a href="https://xcancel.com/porqueTTarg/status/2047652413306277970" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/porqueTTarg/status/2047652413306277970</a>