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Comment by tbran | Hacker News Reader

Love using Ansible (though I don't always love writing YAML).

PROTIP: I use it to manage my laptops/workstations with a hosts entry like:

  [laptop-thinkpad]
  localhost ansible_connection=local

Sometimes I think it's overkill, but the config files are a little easier to visually parse.

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Another nice trick is to use your shebang line.

    #!/usr/bin/env ansible-playbook
    ---
    - hosts: localhost
      connection: local
      vars:
        home: "{{ lookup('env', 'HOME') }}"
      tasks:
        # ...

So then it just becomes.

    pip install -r requirements.txt
    ./install --tags=bash

Deprecated group name format. ;)

I started using Ansible when it was brand new, like 0.2 I believe. It changes so fast that I've had junior co-workers come in and teach me new best practices in Ansible.

That deprecation was deprecated :)

No way, you're kidding!

First I used debian packages and maintained a (multiarch!) repository to setup my computers, then I used Ansible and had to first install Python and SSH on every machine, now I just run a script and I'm done in a few minutes and very few manual steps.

I found Ansible for personal computers to be brittle and cumbersome as reinstalls are usually for OS upgrades and those tend to have breaking changes.

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