Show HN: DebOps – Ansible framework for managing Debian-based environments

Hello, DebOps author here. I thought that I'd write an overview of the project here for new or interested users.

On a basic level, DebOps is a set of Ansible roles and playbooks that manage different services and applications on Debian / Ubuntu hosts. The project was originally designed to manage a data center, but it works fine with a single host as well.

I'm using and have been actively developing it for the last 6 years at a medical university where I'm a full time sysadmin, managing 135 virtual machines spread across 17 on-premise servers. But others who are using DebOps are using it on the cloud while hosting it on Digital Ocean, Hetzner, AWS and other cloud hosting providers. Supported operating systems include Debian, Ubuntu, Raspbian or Devuan.

DebOps has over 160+ Ansible roles and playbooks to set everything you need from the ground up. This ranges from lower level services such as your host's firewall to fully fledged applications like GitLab and Nextcloud.

You'll have all the tools you need to set up common web applications written in various runtimes such as Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Go and many others. But DebOps isn't limited to just web applications running on a single server. You can set up an entire cluster of servers running any workload you want and it's all secured over TLS. Or if you prefer a Docker / LXC environment, there are feature-rich Docker and LXC roles to set up a server to run your containerized applications.

All of the above services are defined as self-contained Ansible roles that can be used as is or you can mix and match any of DebOps' roles with your own custom roles and playbooks. To help get you started in a new server environment, DebOps comes equipped with a common playbook that has a set of roles that are commonly used on all hosts managed by the project, including user management, basic services like NTP, OpenSSH, locale configuration, firewall, and so on.

If you want to start using it, check out the quick start[1] and getting started guides[2]. The quick start has instructions for getting up and running quickly with Docker[3] or Vagrant. The getting started guide gives you step by step instructions on how to configure your DebOps managed environment.

If you have any questions, write a comment here or drop by IRC on Freenode in the #debops channel.

[1]: https://docs.debops.org/en/master/introduction/quick-start.h...

[2]: https://docs.debops.org/en/master/introduction/getting-start...

[3]: docker run -it --rm debops/debops

A lot of what I learned about managing servers came from this project and talking to Maciej (the author of DebOps).

I started using DebOps around 5 years ago. I naturally found it after realizing how much effort it takes to really configure a production ready server. It was nice to see someone had already invested years of effort into a project like that. That got me going so much faster than starting at ground zero (which I did for like 6 months before I found this project and started contributing to it instead).

I mean, I can write a novel about Maciej but the TL;DR is after 20 years of freelancing I've never met a single person who is as knowledge as him when it comes to general sysadmin knowledge, but then you factor in his attention to detail, patience and work ethic and you end up with something special. 5,200+ commits over 6 years is mind boggling (15+ commits a day on average) and everything is done by the books (signing off on commits, impeccable changelog, etc.). The project is ran with code quality standards that rival / exceed some major open source projects.

All I'll say is, I'm very happy to have met him and to have stumbled upon his creation all those years ago. We are lucky to have such high quality Ansible material to use freely.