Alright, let’s talk about my little adventure with “yasel”.
So, I stumbled upon “yasel” a while back, looking for a way to, you know, streamline some repetitive tasks I had. I’d been messing around with command-line tools for ages, but I always felt like there was something missing, some way to tie everything together without writing a ton of boilerplate.
First thing I did, obviously, was to install it. Just a simple pip install yasel. Boom. Done. The docs weren’t the greatest, but they were enough to get me started.
My initial project was pretty basic. I wanted to automate a process where I’d ssh into a bunch of servers, run a command, and then grab the output. Super boring stuff, but it ate up like an hour of my day. So, I cracked open my text editor and started writing a “yasel” script.
Here’s roughly what the first version looked like:
# Sample yasel script
targets = ["server1", "server2", "server3"]
def run_command(target):
result = execute(f"ssh {target} 'uptime'")
return result
results = map(run_command, targets)
for target, result in zip(targets, results):
print(f"Server: {target}")
print(result)
print("-" 20)
Pretty straightforward, right? I used the execute function “yasel” provides. Ran it. And…it worked! Sort of. It printed the output, but there were a bunch of SSH errors mixed in, because sometimes the servers were unreachable or whatever. So, time to iterate.
Next, I added some error handling. Wrapped the execute call in a try...except block. That cleaned things up a lot. Then, I wanted to be able to run different commands on different servers. So I changed the targets variable to be a list of dictionaries:
targets = [
{"name": "server1", "command": "uptime"},
{"name": "server2", "command": "df -h"},
{"name": "server3", "command": "free -m"}
And modified the run_command function accordingly. Getting somewhere now!
The biggest hurdle I faced was dealing with asynchronous execution. “yasel” supports it, but the documentation was kinda vague. I wanted to run these commands in parallel, because waiting for each server sequentially was killing me. After some digging, I figured out how to use the async_execute function. It involved creating an event loop and all that jazz, which was a bit of a headache, but I got it working eventually. Speed increased massively!
After that, it was mostly just adding bells and whistles. Logging the output to a file, sending alerts if a command failed, that sort of thing. I even hooked it up to a simple web interface using Flask, so I could trigger the scripts from my phone. Overkill? Maybe. Fun? Absolutely.
Here are a few things I learned along the way:
Error handling is crucial. Especially when dealing with network stuff.
Read the source code. The docs aren’t always enough.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. “yasel” is pretty flexible, so try different things.
Asynchronous execution is your friend. Especially when dealing with multiple targets.
Honestly, “yasel” isn’t the most polished tool out there, but it’s been a real lifesaver for me. It’s let me automate a bunch of tedious tasks and free up my time to work on more interesting things.
So, yeah, that’s my “yasel” story. Hope it was helpful!
