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Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on a localhost-only system for automation myself, inspired by puppet but with far fewer modules:

As of this week it can now pull down docker-images from dockhub, which was something I'd been needing to rebuild my own systems. Early days, and it is as much proof-of-concept as anything else, but it seems robust and reliable in my own use.

Of course I need to add "written in go" to advertise properly!

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Does this save time in writing your own personal automation or make that personal automation less error prone? How would you compare it to just writing your own bash scripts or using something like Bashible (https://github.com/mig1984/bashible)?

Making things repeatable and scripting will usually be a time-saver (unless you spend 100+ hours writing the automation and never reinstall your hosts!)

For me it was a learning experience as much as anything else. I'd probably have stuck with ansible, puppet, or similar established project if I didn't want to learn/experiment.

On first glance this looks awesome. Certainly will be better than the bunch of scripts I've written to provision my laptops.

Fingers crossed it will work for you, and others!

It replaces a simpler alternative I wrote in the past which used ssh/scp to upload files and run commands:

https://github.com/skx/deployr

Right now I have a git-repository containing per-host config. So I can run something like this via cron:

     cd /srv/config/$(hostname --fqdn)/
     marionette main.in

I should document that, and the inclusion-facility explicitly. But otherwise feel free to file bug-reports/feature-requests if you have ideas for modules that would be useful.

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