[mr_toad]

It’s not that bad. A day or two initially, then an hour or two every six months, depending how much work you put into automating it. It’s definitely a good way to learn.

Write everything down! Every command you type. You don’t want to come back in sixth months time and have to relearn what you did the first time.

If you’re feeling ambitious you can script almost the entire deployment from provisioning a machine through to rsyncing the content. It’s pretty fun to run a bash script or two and see an entire server pop up.

[indemnity]

As a former sysadmin, this is still a lot of pain in the ass. One Terraform file that keeps my S3 + CloudFront sites configured, run once a month to ensure LetsEncrypt certs are rolled, and done.

Have maintained enough servers for a lifetime, I’d rather be coding!

[iudqnolq]

Thanks for the advice! I was stuck thinking I'd have to learn something like Ansible to automate deployments, bash scripts is a greatidea.I

I have Linux on my laptop and I've been trying to document what I configure with heavily commented bash code, but I've run into issues with editing config files. I frequently want to say something like "edit this variable to this value" but sed feels too fragile and easy to mess up silently, relacing the entire file is silently badly future incompatible if other entries in the config get changed in an update, and appending to the file so the last item overrides feels hacky and doesn't always work.

How does everyone else do that?