Replication package for "Smelly Variables in Ansible Infrastructure Code: Detection, Prevalence, and Lifetime" Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Infrastructure as Code is the practice of automating the provisioning, configuration, and orchestration of network nodes using code in which variable values such as configuration parameters, node hostnames, etc. play a central role. Mistakes in these values are an important cause of infrastructure defects and corresponding outages. Ansible, a popular IaC language, nonetheless features semantics which can cause confusion about the value of variables. In this paper, we identify six novel code smells related to Ansible's intricate variable precedence rules and lazy-evaluated template ...