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 )?
Luckilly no, just self interest.
I guess it depends what you’re in to but it doesn’t make much sense for me.
Most everything I do on servers now is in docker containers, and I back up the compose files and data from those so they can be deployed to a new server pretty easily.
Migrating between servers only happens once every several years. I feel like managing an ansible config would just be an additional layer of complexity rather than making it easier. Their isn’t much configuration outside of docker in my case anyway.
I tend to grow my fleet of servers every couple months, and that requires me to once again setup everything from the beginning, settings, sshd, update debian if old version, new user for ssh, docker/podman, …
Quite literally added new vps to my fleet yesterday and spent 4 hourson setting all that up, when it could have been a simple ansible script.
Then yes, learning Ansible is a good way to have base OS settings for your systems. I love that it’s agentless - works over SSH.
The ugly part is that they keep updating it in a backwards incompatible way. In one version the paramerer is called “file” and in another it’s “dest”, they pull shit like this and don’t provide a tool to update playbooks automatically.
But updating is rather optional.
Sed comes into play there, or :%s in vim, whichever you prefer ;)