gear

An infrastructure automation tool inspired by JetPorch, using YAML-based playbooks for task definition and a compiled Go execution engine for running automation over SSH.

Overview

gear is an experiment in replacing Ansible-style configuration management with a compiled Go CLI. Tasks are defined in YAML — similar to Ansible playbooks — and executed against remote hosts over SSH. The difference is that the execution engine itself is a single, dependency-free Go binary rather than a Python runtime.

Heavily inspired by JetPorch — a general-purpose IT automation platform designed by Michael DeHaan, the original creator of Ansible and Cobbler. Gear borrows many of JetPorch's ideas around language simplicity and agentless SSH-based execution, reimplementing them in Go.

Why gear over Ansible?

• No Python runtime dependency on target hosts — all orchestration runs from the gear binary
• YAML for tasks, Go for execution — familiar declarative task syntax backed by a compiled engine
• Type safety — catch configuration errors at parse time, not halfway through a playbook run
• Single binary — easy to distribute and version alongside your infrastructure code

Project Status

Early-stage / experimental. Current version: 0.0.1.

Repository Structure

gear/
├── cmd/
│   └── gear/          # CLI entrypoint
├── internal/
│   └── cli/           # CLI commands and version metadata
├── examples/          # Example configuration files
├── vagrant/           # Vagrant environment for local testing
├── Makefile           # Build tasks
├── go.mod
└── go.sum

Prerequisites

• Go 1.22.3 or later
• SSH access to target hosts (key-based auth recommended)

Building

Generate the version file and build:

make gensrc
go build -o gear ./cmd/gear

Or install directly:

go install github.com/smahm006/gear/cmd/gear@latest

Usage

Define your tasks in a YAML file:

# example.yaml
hosts:
  - user: ubuntu
    address: 192.168.0.10

tasks:
  - name: Ensure /tmp/hello exists
    # ... task definition

Then run:

gear apply -f example.yaml

See the examples/ directory for working configuration samples.

Local Development

A Vagrant environment is included for testing against a local VM:

cd vagrant
vagrant up

Dependencies

Package	Purpose
github.com/pkg/sftp	SFTP file transfer to remote hosts
golang.org/x/crypto	SSH client authentication
gopkg.in/yaml.v3	Parsing task configuration files

Roadmap

• Core task primitives (file, command, template, package)
• Idempotent execution (check mode)
• Inventory file support
• Parallel host execution
• Role/module system analogous to Ansible roles

License

MIT