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Comment by ryan-duve | Hacker News Reader

I've never used Ansible. Is it worth using for just this workflow? I'm asking coming from a baseline of just having a Git-versioned shell script which has lines like

    brew install coreutils

and whathaveyou.

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You get the nice stuff that Ansible brings, like adding specific lines to .zshrc, templates, etc. I found it easier than my usually-beloved shell scripts because I didn't need to think about the mechanism, just the result.

For example, brew install coreutils would use the community.general.homebrew module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... <-- you can see from that page that each module has lots of examples, which makes it pretty easy to go from requirements to Ansible script.

You have to think about the mechanism if you remove a file. Ansible is imperative like a shell script, not declarative.

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