Augeas

Augeas is a name associated with more than one topic, most commonly a figure in Greek mythology and a software project for configuration editing. In myth, Augeas was the king of Elis in the Peloponnese and is best known for the Augean stables, a landmark task in the labors of Heracles. According to the myth, the king’s vast stables had not been cleaned for years, and Heracles completed the cleansing, in some tellings by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth. The episode is often cited as an example of clever problem-solving and the complexities of reward and punishment in heroic stories.

Augeas also refers to an open-source software project that provides a configuration editing tool and library for Unix-like systems. It offers a framework to edit configuration files by representing them as a tree and applying changes through lenses, mappings that connect tree nodes to specific configuration values. This approach enables programmatic, non-destructive edits across a variety of configuration formats, supporting features such as transactional changes and validation. The project exposes command-line interfaces as well as bindings for languages such as Python, Ruby, and Perl, and is used by configuration management tools to implement idempotent edits and reduce manual text editing of complex files. In both uses, the name Augeas denotes a method of transformation—mythic cleansing by Heracles and structured, rule-based editing in software.