Sensible is a preprocessor that turns a file of S-expressions into a set of YAML files for use with Ansible.
You can write playbooks, roles, and host groups as S-expressions. The syntax is simpler and more consistent than YAML, and you can write everything in one file instead of gardening a whole directory tree full of little YAML files. The specific syntax we use is Portable S-expressions (POSE).
Sensible is being used to configure real servers, but there are still sharp edges and the UI is lacking convenience and polish.
python3 -m pip install PyYAML
python3 -m pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --no-deps pose_exprThe command sensible foo.pose will generate Ansible files into the
current directory.
The command sensible foo.pose -o foo will generate them into a
subdirectory foo.
Sensible is intentionally "dumb": it supports only a very limited S-expression surface syntax (POSE -- Portable S-expressions) and does not have its own programming language (Scheme or Lisp dialect). If it were to have its own syntax and Lisp dialect, people would never agree on which one. Some would want Scheme, some Common Lisp, and some Clojure. And even if that question was settled, people would not agree on which language subset and extensions to offer.
It's easy to use any existing Lisp dialect and implementation to generate S-expressions suitable for Sensible, and this is what people should do.
Sensible itself is written in Python since everyone who has Ansible will also have Python. An earlier prototype was written in Scheme.