Some Ansible advice for around the home!
Take work home? Not Stuart Burns – he applies home projects to work.
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.
Ansible as a subject isn’t served well by diving into every part of it straight away, but looking at it bit by bit, as it’s needed, tends to work well. What follows is ‘just enough Ansible to be useful’ as an intro.
Why Ansible? Shell scripts still work but they can be clunky. Commands that would run to several lines in a shell script can replaced with just two lines in an Ansible playbook.