Augeas

I spent the past afternoon wrestling with fabric, Apache, Virtualenv and PostgreSQL.

I was going to write a long post about how Unix is old, creaky and mostly designed to be used with a text editor, when I heard about Augeas. Augeas is a tool to modify UNIX config files from the commandline. It’s used by a lot of projects, notably Puppet.

This is how you add an entry in /etc/hosts with augeas:

set /files/etc/hosts/01/ipaddr 192.168.0.1

I’m not a fan of representing everything as a tree, but it beats echo "192.168.0.1 ipaddr" >> /etc/hosts;.

I guess I’ll have to hold on this rant for another day.