OtterScript Overview

OtterScript is a Domain-Specific Language that was designed in tandem with the execution engine to represent configuration plans and orchestration plans in Otter, and deployment plans in BuildMaster. Because a DSL is inherently limited in functionality, a key feature of is the ability to "drop down" to a lower-level scripting language as needed.

While OtterScript is neither a general-purpose programming language (like Ruby), nor a general-purpose mark-up language (like YAML), it was inspired by both, and allows you to build declarative and imperative plans.

Language Design Goals

In addition to meeting implementing the actual requirements of an advanced execution engine capable of executing across thousands of servers, we built OtterScript with these factors in mind:

• easy to learn for those with little to no programming experience
• familiar and intuitive to those with intermediate programming experience
• extensible and powerful for those with programming and domain expertise

In fact, using the Visual Mode in the plan editor, many users may not even realize they're building plans using OtterScript.

As you become more familiar with the execution engine, this ref