scriptengine

ScriptEngine

ScriptEngine is a lightweight and extensible framework for executing scripts written in YAML. The main purpose of ScriptEngine is to replace shell scripts in situations where highly configurable and modular scripts are needed. ScriptEngine relies on YAML and makes extensive use of Jinja2 templating to provide a comprehensive scripting language. This allows users to put focus on the description of tasks, rather than their implementation. The description of complex tasks should be nearly as short and clear as for simpler ones.

The ScriptEngine concept separates scripts (what to do) from the implementation of tasks (how to do things), and also from the actual execution environment (the script engine instances). This modularity allows the provision of different execution models (e.g. sequential or parallel; local or remote) within the same framework.

ScriptEngine provides a concise set of basic tasks that users can use to write their scripts. However, extensibility is a fundamental principle for ScriptEngine. Complementary task sets are provided as Python packages that can be loaded into ScriptEngine at run time. Thus, the capabilities of ScriptEngine scripts is only limited by available task sets.

ScriptEngine tasks are simple Python classes with a run() method, which means that it is rather easy to build new tasks sets for particular needs. And because everything is based on Python3, there is a wide range of modules available to get the actual work done easily and efficiently.

ScriptEngine is open source software, hosted at GitHub. Up-to-date ScriptEngine packages are provided at PyPI and conda-forge, so installation is as easy as pip install scriptengine or conda install scriptengine. Documentation, including more detailed installation instructions, is published at ReadtheDocs.