A decade of config surgery with Augeas

David Lutterkort

Augeas is a configuration editing tool. It parses configuration files intheir native formats and transforms them into a tree. Configuration changesare made by manipulating this tree and saving it back into native configfiles.The tool, and this description, recently turned 10 years old, a milestonethat I will celebrate with a stroll down memory lane, looking at Augeasoriginal goals and subsequent achievements over the past decade. Over thattime, it has become an important building block for configurationmanagement tools like Puppet and Salt, and is used by tools such as EFFsLets Encrypt, OSQuery, and libvirt.I will talk about some of the basic patterns for using Augeas to performsurgery on configuration files, share some tips on how to get the most outof its tree structure, and how to use it to perform idempotent changes. Iwill also talk about a few areas where Augeas can be improved, and where

About Speaker

David is a software engineer at Puppet, where he iss worked on various projects such as the Puppet plan language and Razor, the best provisioning tool, ever. Before joining Puppet, David worked at Red Hat on a variety of management tools and served as the maintainer of Apache Deltacloud. He was one of the earliest contributors to Puppet and is the main author of Augeas, a configuration editing tool.