Why Bedouin

Bedouin replaces an Ansible + chezmoi setup for bootstrapping dev machines. It exists because both break in specific, repeatable ways, and the design is shaped around those breakages rather than around being a general tool.

Ansible needs a working Python

The one thing a freshly imaged machine cannot promise is a usable Python. Stock Python on Ubuntu is unreliable, and Galaxy plus the 3.10+ churn make it worse. A bootstrap tool cannot depend on the thing you are bootstrapping.

Bedouin is a single static binary with zero runtime dependencies. On Linux it is musl-linked, so it does not even need a matching libc — it runs on a bare container image with nothing installed on it, which is exactly the machine it is for.

Ansible steps do not reload the environment

Install Rust in one step and cargo is not on PATH for the next, because the step inherited the environment as it was when the run began. The usual workaround is splitting the work into sequential playbooks and re-entering the shell between them.

Bedouin constructs each step’s environment itself. Every install records where it put its binaries, and the next step’s PATH is assembled from those recorded directories plus a minimal system base — never from your shell.

languages:
  - name: rust
    installer: rustup      # records ~/.cargo/bin

packages:
  - name: zellij
    from: cargo            # and this step's PATH has it

One run, both steps, correct order. You never tell Bedouin where rustup puts cargo; that is the installer’s business and Bedouin knows it.

chezmoi renders one way

chezmoi syncs templates. Once rendered, edits to the rendered file cannot flow back — you change something in your shell and the change is stranded on that machine.

Bedouin owns the rendering, and absorb lifts an edit back into the config. doctor finds what you changed by hand, absorb puts it in the file that survives the machine.

What Bedouin is not

Not a general configuration-management tool. No Windows, no secrets management (reference an external one — 1Password CLI, age), no service orchestration. It sets up dev environments. Ansible remains better at everything else, and that is fine.