Ask HN: How do you manage multiple Linux servers?

2 pointsjustadudeama2 comments

I use a couple of personal linux servers for personal projects and other self hosted goodies. I want to make sure I am staying up to date and secure, what is the best way to do that? I am finding it tedious to SSH into each one every once in a while to run a manual update/upgrade. I have seen some solutions here, but what do you guys use?

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You can use some sort of configuration management tool to manage most of that from one centralized place. Some examples are chef, puppet, ansible, etc.

I recommend ansible since it's pretty lightweight and uses plain old ssh (i.e.: no agent daemon required). You can setup some simple playbooks or run some tasks remotely on one or multiple servers at the same time.

These tools are very flexible but they do require a bit of a learning curve so it may not be worthwhile for 2 servers. It's still a valuable skill set for anybody with a bit of devops interest.

I second Ansible choice, it is fantastic tool.

I put my playbooks along with my code in the repository and am doing what's called Infrastructure as Code where not only the application code, but basically all processes around managing the application are being developed and versioned along with the core application.

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