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Comment by cybrox | Hacker News Reader

I just use Ansible for this purpose.

All my work machines are set up using a single, parameterized Ansible playbook.

Avoiding Ansible is precisely why I use chezmoi.

Unfortunately I still have to use Ansible for stuff that isn't my dotfiles, but the less Ansible, the better. It feels like whatever use cases I have for Ansible are weird and not what other people are doing, because everything I try to do is difficult and poorly documented. For example, when I try to spin up a machine running Alpine Linux using Ansible, I've encountered all sorts of strange bugs, some of which I've reported and are (being) fixed, but it boggles my mind that what I thought would be really basic stuff, like setting the hostname or the timezone, is buggy as heck.

Oh, if you wouldn't mind sharing, that would be greatly appreciated! For set up of my machine(s), I was going to go the route of using a bash or python script...but when i learned (a high level summary) of ansible, figured that might be a skill that i can leverage for work in the future too. So, I'm trying to play, learn about ansible. (I already have basics of python, so ansible was an add-on for me.) The more that i can learn from examples of others, the better i can learn what are good practices, etc. Thanks!

I've shared an example based on what I currently use here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639329 :)

I used to use bash scripts myself, however, I did transition to Ansible because I often ran into problems with replayability of scripts (running them multiple times).

Ansible (and other tools like it) handle stuff like "change a line in this config file to that" or "add this flag here when xyz" easily and you can run it as many times as you like.

Also, Ansible Galaxy offers a lot of roles ready-to-use such as docker setup or asdf version manager plugin management. Though a lot of it is often not that well maintained.

Clever, I'll have to look into that. I thought this was a no-brainer and that this was something everyone did some way or another. I use github for my dotfiles, also, try to keep them synchronized on my mac/pc/linux for familiarity. very simple stuff though. Also easy to pack and transport in cases where I cannot directly connect to internet.

Can you share it?

Unfortunately, I can't share it "as is", as it has grown a lot over the years and contains a lot of information about my home and work network topology and setups. (I host it on a private git server)

I copied some of it into an example repository to showcase the structure and left the playbook.yaml intact for reference. You can find it on: https://github.com/cybrox/ansible-setup-example

I don't want to claim that this structure is in any way better or worse than anything else, it's just one that works for me. There's a lot of discussion on how Ansible projects should be structured. This allows me to simply run `WORKSTATION=home DESKTOP=wayland ansible-playbook playbook.yaml` on a fresh Arch Linux install and everything is ready to go.

For maintaining the repository, I got used to changing things in there and deploying them instead of changing dotfiles directly. However, I do also deploy a bash script to copy all the files from the system back to the repo to catch dotfile edits I did hastily at 3am.

An example of dotfiles being deployed with this approach is roles/shell/tasks/zsh.yaml

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