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7 Augeas is a library and command line tool that focuses on the most basic
8 problem in handling Linux configurations programmatically: editing actual
9 configuration files in a controlled manner.
11 To that end, Augeas exposes a tree of all configuration settings (well,
12 all the ones it knows about) and a simple local API for manipulating the
13 tree. Augeas then modifies underlying configuration files according to
14 the changes that have been made to the tree; it does as little modeling
15 of configurations as possible, and focuses exclusively on transforming
16 the tree-oriented syntax of its public API to the myriad syntaxes of
17 individual configuration files.
19 This focus on editing sets Augeas apart from any other configuration tool
20 I know of. Hopefully, Augeas will form a more solid foundation on which
21 these tools can be built; with a clean, simple API these tools should
22 be able to focus more on their core concerns and less on the mechanics
23 of running sed, grep, awk, etc. to tweak a config file.
25 If all you need is a tool to edit configuration files, you only need to
26 concern yourself with the handful of public API calls that Augeas exposes
27 (or their equivalent language bindings). However, to teach Augeas about a
28 new file format, you need to describe that file format in Augeas's domain
29 specific language (a very small subset of ML) Documentation for that
30 language can be found on the Augeas website at http://augeas.net/ If you
31 do that, please contribute the description if at all possible, or include
32 it in the distribution of your software - all you need to do for that is
33 add a couple of text files, there is no need to change existing
34 code. Ultimately, Augeas should describe all config files commonly found
40 Augeas is as much defined by the things it does _not_ try to accomplish
43 * No abstraction from native config format, i.e. the organization of
44 the tree mirrors closely how the native config files are organized
45 * No cross-platform abstraction - what is logically the same value may
46 live in different places in the tree on different
47 distributions. Dealing with that should be left to a higher-level
49 * No remote management support. Augeas is a local API, other ways of
50 access to Augeas should be built on top of it
51 * No (or very little) modelling. Augeas is focused on syntax
52 transformation, not on any higher-level understanding of
55 The above non-goals are of course important concerns in
56 practice. Historically though, too many config mgmt projects have failed
57 because they set their sights too high and tried to address syntax
58 transformation, modelling, remote support, and scalable management all in
59 one. That leads to a lack of focus, and to addressing each of those goals
65 These instructions apply to building a released tarball. If you want to
66 build from a git checkout, see the file HACKING.
68 See the generic instructions in INSTALL. Generally,
72 should be all that is needed.
74 You need to have readline-devel installed. On systems that support
75 SELinux, you should also install libselinux-devel.
80 Documentation can be found on Augeas' website http://augeas.net/ The site
81 also contains information on how to get in touch, what you can do to help
87 Augeas is released under the [Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html)
88 See the file COPYING for details.