Is ansible worth learning to automate setting up servers? (lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by crony@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Hello, I have recently been seeing a boom in people using ansible for automating setting up vps's, services, ...

Is it worth it to learn ansible to do also automate the way I setup everything, or is a bash script good enough ( I know some bash scripting but ansible seems like it could be more worth the time to learn )?

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[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago

If you haven't used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.

However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.

But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.

this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024

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