What is red?

red is a code library, built with TypeScript and the Bun runtime, for developers who want to build their own command line tools for managing infrastructure and servers. The idea behind it is that you describe the state you want your systems to end up in using a YAML file, and red runs a workflow, a series of connected steps, that gets things to that state. Running the same workflow twice should not cause problems, it should just confirm the state is already correct, which is what the README means by idempotent. A workflow in red is built from small steps, each one a simple function that takes in some data and returns updated data, and the library handles chaining these steps together, running independent steps at the same time when it can, and cleanly stopping a workflow if one branch fails. It also lets you attach extra behavior to any step, such as running something before or after it, without changing the step itself. On top of this, red bundles support for generating files from templates, and for working with two other well known infrastructure tools, OpenTofu for provisioning cloud infrastructure and Ansible for connecting to and configuring servers over SSH. The project ships with a handful of worked examples, including setting up a ZooKeeper cluster, that show a small command line script creating, dry running, and deleting a set of resources defined in a YAML file. Some of the more advanced examples need real cloud accounts or tools like Docker to actually run, but most have an offline dry run mode that works without them. The project is not yet published as an official package on npm, so anyone wanting to use it right now needs to point their own project at a specific pinned version straight from the git repository rather than an official release. A full written specification of how the library is supposed to behave is included in the repository.