Is ansible worth learning to automate setting up servers?

CronyAkatsuki@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 80 points –

Hello, I have recently been seeing a boom in people using ansible for automating setting up vps's, services, ...

Is it worth it to learn ansible to do also automate the way I setup everything, or is a bash script good enough ( I know some bash scripting but ansible seems like it could be more worth the time to learn )?

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I think it is a great way to document what you have done too. Especially with larger setups this can be quite time-intensive.

Then add that you may want to dynamically reconfigure your systems to interact with each other and then Ansibles template-rendering comes in really handy.

Finally, it is standardized - so other peopke can work with it too (relevant in work context).

This sounds amazing!

You have any good resources to recommend for learning ansible?

Sorry, but I fear not. Ansible has a good getting started out there, but I think you'll learn the most just using it.

Maybe a broad roadmap... Try to add systems. Test them via Ansible-Ping. Change some configs (add file, add line-in-file). Add handlers to react to changes by restarting services. Add host variables and customize behavior per host. Add templates...

Learn Linux TV has a good series as does Jeff Geerling both are free on YouTube.

I prefer the Learn Linux TV one as it goes through how to integrate git and different distros.