Ruxel

Rust-native automation without the YAML archaeology.

Ruxel is a drop-in, performance-first executor for the exact Ansible workload that provisions and maintains the ChainArgos dedicated servers. Same playbook files, same inventory, same check/diff/limit invocation shape — rebuilt in Rust around one goal: never repeat work that is already done, and prove it in seconds.

A converged server answers "0 changed, verified" in seconds instead of ~15 minutes. A drifted server gets exactly the drifted tasks re-applied. A fresh server provisions with maximum parallelism. No Python on any target, ever.

Status

Research and design phase. The CLI shape exists; the engine intentionally does not yet. Read the docs in order:

1. docs/VISION.md — the problem, the vision, goals, non-goals, and the hard safety rule.
2. docs/WORKLOAD.md — the closed compatibility spec: every module and feature the playbooks use, with counts. Ruxel implements this and nothing else.
3. docs/DIRECTION.md — problem analysis, prior art, recommended architecture, alternatives considered.
4. docs/SKEPTIC.md — the adversarial pass: churn evidence, untuned-Ansible finding, NixOS/OpenTofu verdicts. Outcome: the operator decided to build the full drop-in.
5. docs/SEMANTICS.md — normative spec: exactly what Ansible does with these files (param- and value-scoped, closed surface, ⚠-marked items pinned by parity experiments).
6. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — the detailed concept: transport decision (SSH as carrier, "gRPC minus the g" protocol), streaming execution, register-dependency pipelining, batched system caches, the convergence ledger, warm-daemon tier.
7. docs/PLAN.md — milestones M1–M6 with acceptance gates and the spec-drift CI watch.

Hard safety rule

The six target hosts in the reference workload are production. Nothing in this repository — code, tests, benchmarks, experiments — may ever connect to them. Development happens exclusively against disposable targets explicitly provided by the operator. See AGENTS.md.

Usage (target shape)

ruxel plan  -i hosts.ini --limit postgresql-nova setup-postgresql-nova.yml
ruxel apply -i hosts.ini --limit postgresql-nova setup-postgresql-nova.yml

Development

Toolchain is pinned via rust-toolchain.toml; extra dev tools are managed with mise:

mise install
cargo build
cargo nextest run    # or: cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --all --check

License

Apache-2.0