picard

“Make it so.” – Captain Jean-Luc Picard

The idea of Ansible with the execution of Make.

With Picard, you define a set of targets, each with a recipe that leaves it in a desired state, e.g. a compiled executable or a running service. Targets may depend on each other, e.g. “this executable depends on that source file” or “this service depends on that host”, in a directed acyclic graph. Like Make, Picard executes the recipes for targets in dependency order.

Like Ansible, Picard comes with many sophisticated recipes out-of-the-box that behave like rsync: they find the differences between a target’s present state and its goal state, and execute just the changes necessary to transition from the first to the second.

Make is limited to considering targets on the local filesystem, while Ansible can consider more general targets and states, e.g. the existence and configuration of remote machines. Ansible’s input is a rigid declarative template (based on Jinja), while Make’s input is an executable script that builds the abstract definitions of the targets and gets to leverage functions and variables. Picard tries to combine the best of both worlds in pure Python.