Ansible alternatives for FreeBSD. Which is better to use?

[Alexandr Kirilov]

Hello all!

Is there any alternatives for Ansible (https://www.ansible.com/)? Which is better to use? Is there any automation tools that is under BSD license?

 

[SirDice]

Puppet is still quite popular, even though a lot of companies are migrating from Puppet to Ansible. Puppet has a pretty steep learning curve though, and it requires a server and agents. Which one is "better" is a matter of opinion. Both Puppet and Ansible have their strengths and weaknesses.

 

[rootbert]

I recommend saltstack - it uses the Apache license.

 

[Alexandr Kirilov]

Puppet is still quite popular, even though a lot of companies are migrating from Puppet to Ansible. Puppet has a pretty steep learning curve though, and it requires a server and agents. Which one is "better" is a matter of opinion. Both Puppet and Ansible have their strengths and weaknesses.

Ansible is under GPL license

 

[Ole]

Puppet has a pretty steep learning curve though, and it requires a server and agents.

Server is optional. Look at the `puppet apply` command.

 

[hhartzer]

SaltStack works well, although recent versions have been flaky. I like writing Ansible, but it's very slow to run. It's a shame that it's GPL, but other than that I'm good with it.

Is there a more FreeBSD-native tool for configuring hosts in an automated fashion?

 

[tuaris]

I can also recommend Salt over Ansible. I've worked with Salt on Ubuntu and found it to be very reliable. I'd use it on FreeBSD, but I haven't really seen the need for it (yet).

FreeBSD is pretty well designed out of the box to just manage it with shell scripts over ssh/git/http. The separation of packages from the base system and the increased availability of conf.d style configuration files makes it almost unnecessary to use a config management framework.