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Sinter

What is Sinter?

Sinter is a lightweight, agentless configuration-management tool, inspired by Itamae. It describes and applies operating-system configuration from a single Rust binary. Managed hosts require no Sinter agent and no Ruby or Python runtime — only an SSH server, /bin/sh, systemd, and passwordless sudo -n where privilege escalation is needed.

Design goals

Section titled “Design goals”
  • Small enough to understand. A deliberately narrow scope: no inventory, roles, plugins, orchestration, or embedded scripting.
  • Strong enough to trust. Observation-only plans, re-observation before every mutation, strict SSH host-key checking, fail-closed parsing, and truthful result reporting.
  • Idempotent. Re-applying a recipe that already matches performs zero mutations.

What a run looks like

Section titled “What a run looks like”
Terminal window
sinter validate recipe.yaml                          # schema check, no target contact
sinter plan --host web01.example.com recipe.yaml     # observe only
sinter apply --host web01.example.com --sudo recipe.yaml

plan produces a non-authoritative preview. apply re-observes every stateful resource immediately before deciding whether to mutate it — a previous plan is never reused as current state.

One host per invocation

Section titled “One host per invocation”

Each plan or apply targets exactly one host. Omit --host to run against the controller itself (localhost); pass --host for a remote SSH target. There is no Ansible-style inventory: Sinter has no host lists, groups, or fleet orchestration. To manage multiple hosts, invoke Sinter once per host (the same recipe works everywhere in the support matrix); run any fan-out or ordering you need from your own scripts.

Supported managed targets

Section titled “Supported managed targets”
Platform Architecture Package backend
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS amd64 apt
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS amd64 apt
Rocky Linux 9 x86_64 dnf
Rocky Linux 10 x86_64 dnf
RHEL 9 x86_64 dnf
RHEL 10 x86_64 dnf
AlmaLinux 9 x86_64 dnf
AlmaLinux 10 x86_64 dnf

See Compatibility for requirements and the acceptance reference.

What Sinter is not

Section titled “What Sinter is not”

Sinter does not aim to replace general-purpose orchestration systems. It has no inventory, no agent daemon, no templating programming language, and no cluster-wide coordination. It is a small tool for describing and applying configuration on individual Linux hosts.