That's a good point. Ansible is robust, well-known, well-supported, and has support for doing anything and everything from creating users, to setting cron-jobs, MySQL users, and more.

This application only allows two things:

* Uploading a file, or series of files. * Running a command, or series of commands.

In short I'm very simple. But because of that it avoids some of the horrors of trying to be overly-complex in the way that Ansible is. It avoids cryptic failures, and the horrible "language" for looping constructs, etc.

I could imagine adding support for cron, mysql, etc, but I think as soon as you allow real conditional actions to such utilities it becomes a mess to use.

So perhaps this is most comparable to Python's fabric library.

Yes I think that is a fair comparison. Fabric allows a similar set of primitives.

Go binaries are self-contained, unlike Ansible, which is a Python module. There are no runtime dependencies, and no worries about which version of Python and module version combination might be in use. This ensures uniformity of behavior among all users, and minimizes installation and operational difficulties.

This. I think Go Templates can be nearly or equally as powerful as Jinja2, but there may need to be additional filters and shortcodes added like Hugo.

To make this useful I guess you'd probably want more filters in the "language", to allow conditionals, looping, etc.

Those are things I deliberately left out, but I could be open to persuasion if the expression was natural.