A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I think you're looking for Ansible. Have fun!
The difference between an Anible playbook and a script, is Ansible has a 'check', 'change', 'verify' pattern, and is declarative (meaning that once the playbook is made, it tends to keep working on future versions of Ansible.)
Ehhh... as someone who does devops, you should dive into ansible core changelogs on github sometime ;)
I assume you mean to check on his often they're is the breaking changes? :)
Declarative style isn't perfect, but it's a massive improvement from straight bash scripting.
💯
We're an ansible shop and yeah it's better than bash scripting (where it makes sense) but ansible.. man it does have some peculiarities :/
I would like to have a mechanism to set up a server automagically…
NixOS.
Similarly I would like to set up my user account settings
Home-manager.
Ansible is definitely one way to do this. If your machines are VMs, then also building VM images with packer can be the way.
For tmux, vim, etc. You can still use ansible or some specific tool for dotfiles, like chezmoi (there are a bunch). You can even use ansible to run chezmoi!
on top of ansible to setup system services and user accounts, I have found this https://github.com/andsens/homeshick to help getting my user settings back
I use https://www.chezmoi.io/ for the same purpose of managing dotfiles. There are a bunch of tools to do this that you can pick your poison :)
Make an ansible playbook
If it's because you set new servers very frequently: Ansible
If it's because moving stuff once every two years to a new server is an hassle: everything in custom docker images
Hey, please remember to tag your post! Thank you
You're probably looking for some sort of configuration management tool like chef, ansible, saltstack, or puppet. If you're not already familiar with one, ansible is pretty easy to get started with.
If you're also wanting something that can create the server itself, terraform is great and supports most cloud providers and supervisors.
Bare metal servers, VPSs, or VM's you host? If it's for VM's you host, then consider Proxmox as hypervisor and use VM templates. I'm sure old school sysops could to the same with QEMU and Virtmanager or something. But basically, I just set up a VM exactly how I like it, then convert it to a template and cookie cutter it out.
I can sense the Nix guys shaking their heads - it's on my list to try :- )
Why is infra as a code so sought after? I feel like this is installation scripts and config like bare bones, but you need another layer to make it work on top. What am I missing?
Isn't that Docker?
Containers have to run somewhere too..