Of late, this writer has been busy creating new virtual hosts for different things and decided that it would be an ideal time to get stuck into Ansible. Things have evolved in system management since Bash.
Ansible is a great way to deploy software configurations to servers and Linux machines in general. (Windows works, too, but with caveats.) It’s reliable, repeatable, easy to use and very extendable. And what you learn here can easily be expanded to work on remote machines.
We found ourselves building an Ansible configuration (aka a playbook) for our home desktops. That way, when the desktop needs rebuilding, it is as simple as a base install, install Ansible and run the playbook to put it back to just how you like it.