| I recently wrote something like this, as I was replacing my home media center/server box with new hardware, and wanted to start fresh instead of imaging the drive and copying it over. At first I considered that it would be a good opportunity to learn something like Ansible, but after looking at the getting started docs, I realized I didn't feel like taking the time. So, a bash script! I wrote a script that assumed I'd just installed a Debian base image. The script installs a couple needed things with apt-get, adds some extra config to /etc/apt, and then does a full upgrade, as well as installing other needed packages. Next it creates some daemon users & groups, copies in a file system overlay (mostly config files), and then has a list of things to download and install to /opt (stuff that isn't available from a Debian repository). There are a few things I run on it that come in Docker containers, so those are set up (with systemd service files) as well. Finally it installs duplicity and restores app data that gets backed up nightly to S3 on my original media server box, and sets things up so those backups will happen on the new box as well. Ultimately I'm not thrilled with it: some of it is fragile (like 'sed' that changes existing config files), and I of course made mistakes as I was writing it, so I had to also take care that the script was idempotent and could handle being run multiple times on the same box without erroring or re-doing what had already been done. I imagine/assume something like Ansible (or Chef or Puppet or whatever) would handle this for me. But it worked, and was fairly low-effort compared to learning a new provisioning system, so it's fine. Maybe I'll learn Ansible another day. |