Hi friends, I’m back, this time jotting down some notes around my go-to way to provision VMs using Ansible. This post assumes Debian (Nix may be a future post).
Of course there’s many ways to provision a server, and this is just one of them. I hope some of these notes are helpful!
If you have any other ways you prefer to set up a server, that would be cool to share!
Again, capable of a lot but it’s best at configuration management. I like to use Ansible after I install an OS to do things like tweak SSH to be more secure, install Fish shell, set common environment variables and aliases, create a bin folder in my home directory, and clone down a bunch of custom scripts I have and a remote Git repository. You can do this kind of thing with a bash script also but with a well written ansible playbook you can run it over and over and it can fix configuration drift (in my example it could ensure my repository of scripts is up to date).