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<section>
<p>
Every time that I do a clean install on my machine it takes a few hours till I
get to point where I was before formatting it, install all packages, select
themes, icons, fonts, install IDEs, extensions and so on. After doing it a few
times I came to the conclusion that I would save time by spending time
automating this chore, and as a result, I could tinker a little more with my
system and not worry about spending a weekend re-installing everything (which
have happened more time that I'd like to remember).
</p>
<p>
So after a few attempts using python and bash I ended with many files and
keep everything organized and concise turned out to be more tedious than the
setup itself. So there comes <a href="https://www.ansible.com/">Ansible</a>.
It is an enterprise-graded software used to automate tasks. It has A LOT OF
features and it can be really helpful if you're a sysadmin but for now we're
going to focuson
<a href="https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_intro.html#ansible-pull">
Ansible Pull
</a>
and
<a href="https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks.html">
Playbooks
</a>. As better described:
<blockquote>
[Ansible-Pull] is used to up a remote copy of ansible on each managed
node, each set to run via cron and update playbook source via a source
repository. This inverts the default push architecture of Ansible into a
pull architecture, which has near-limitless scaling potential.
Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration
language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to
enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.
(<a href="https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-pull.html">source</a>)
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
The goal is to pull and run a playbook remotely using a git repository. The
playbook will describe the tasks needed to setup our machine from scratch.
<br/>
But first lets tinker a bit a with playbooks locally with ansible-playbook,
to do so we need to add localhost to ansible's hosts list. Add it to
/etc/ansible/hosts:
<pre><code>[all]
localhost</code></pre>
</p>
<p>
As an experiment we're going to write a asks to install vim. Currently, I'm
using Fedora thus we going to use dnf modeule to install packages, but if
you're using another distribution look for a equivalent module like apt
module for Ubuntu.
The playbook to install is quite simple:
<pre><code># main.yaml
- hosts: all
tasks:
- name: install vim
dnf:
name: vim
state: latest</code></pre>
<dl>
<dt>host</dt>
<dd>it is required and it has to match our hosts otherwise the playbook won't run.</dd>
<dt>taks</dt>
<dd>
it is the list of tasks that the playbook will perform, in this case
will be dnf install vim.
</dd>
</dl>
</p>
<p>
To run a playbook use the command ansible-playbook commando to run main.yml
direct from disk, do to so just run the following command:
<pre><code>sudo ansible-playbook --connection=local main.yml</code></pre>
</p>
<p>
After a few seconds, vim will be installed on your machine.
<pre><code>PLAY [all] *************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] *************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [install vim] *****************************************************
ok: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP *************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0</code></pre>
</p>
<p>
This is the first step, next part we shall create a more complex playbook and
setup repository to run it remotely using ansible-pull.
</p>
</section>
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