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by dankobgd 423 days ago
Just use Ansible, it's the best for installing and configuring things
5 comments

Professionally? Sure. Personally, I don't want to learn and maintain ansible for something I do once every 5-7 years. I basically diffed the defaults and got the settings I need to change in my script. I then add or remove them as I tweak things (infrequently). The rest of my shell script is a Makefile I use cross platform for making directories and stow-ing dotfiles.
No. I tried, the person from which I initially based my conf repo[1] tried too[2], we both went away from it (w/o communication between us). We both realized Ansible is good for managing many machines in a professional environment, but waaaay overkill to manage the configuration of a single machine (or two or three), as well as incredibly obtuse in its syntax.

[1] <https://github.com/Frizlab/frizlabs-conf> [2] <https://github.com/wincent/wincent>

I think the lessons in this article are still great and you can automate them via ansible. E.g. install brew, run brewfile, apply default config, etc.
slow solution if you want to configure your box quickly and idempotently whenever you launch a terminal (IMO).
I'm always a little upset when I read posts excited about configuring things, where they've missed the obvious tooling that's designed for it. Not sure why, but it makes me sad.
Obvious to whom? We don’t all know everything. Also, rolling your own can be an interesting learning exercise.