`extra-platforms` for environment detection

[Fizzadar]

Discussed in #1563

^{Originally posted by kdeldycke February 26, 2026}
I discovered PyInfra thanks to @wowi42's talk at FOSDEM 2026.

I maintain the extra-platforms Python package, which helps me detect architectures, platforms, shells, terminals and CI systems, and group them by family. Something I need for my various multi-platform CLIs.

extra-platforms was born out of limitations of the distro package, that PyInfra also relies on. So there is a natural filiation.

Quickly looking at PyInfra code, there is no concept of family. So you have to do write things like:

if host.get_fact(LinuxName) == "Fedora" and host.get_fact(LinuxName) == "Ubuntu" and host.get_fact(LinuxName) == "RedHat":
    hostname_file = "/etc/hostname"
elif "BSD" in host.get_fact(Os):
    hostname_file = "/etc/bsd_convention"

With extra-platforms, you can rely on family matching:

from extra_platforms import is_linux, is_bsd

if is_linux():
    hostname_file = "/etc/hostname"
elif is_bsd():
    hostname_file = "/etc/bsd_convention"

So I think extra-platforms could be a good fit for PyInfra.

And you can go deep because extra-platforms covers:

• 57 platforms
• 26 architectures
• 13 shells
• 20 terminals
• 11 CI systems