[PaulHoule]

Manually installing deps is where you are getting lost.

If you have a clean os install (say a new cloud vm) you can write a script (say in bash) that installs dependencies.

For instance I wrote a Java program that used AWS to spin up a VM and commanded the machine to run a bash init script, which in turn posted a message to SQS when the build succeeded or failed. (Since it didn’t involve making a large number of network requests over time this build script was simple and reliable…. It didn’t involve holding an ssh connection for a long time or other schemes that could get hung up because the build tool got hung up.)

Docker, vagrant, ansible require you to do all the work above , still know everything you’d need to know to write a bash script AND require you to learn more about a tool and work around its quirks.

Look at what the minimum requirements are — a two-step operation (1) build machine, and (2) build the system on the machine was good enough and has the simplest possible error handling scenario (never have a network request between my workstation and the build machine cause step 2 to fail or need recovery).