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How have you automated configuring your machines in terms of packages and dotfiles so it works cross-distro?

I’m looking for interesting tools to automate managing packaging and configuring everything automated.

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment so I for now know these:

  • Ansible - automating many machines, using different package names as vars and package managers.
  • Bash - the most native and compatible scripting language that can be.
  • Chezmoi - for dotfiles.

For now that’s it. I’m looking forward for your suggestions!

Takios ,
@Takios@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I use SaltStack to automate my servers. Just feels better than Ansible to me.
For my PC and laptop I don’t do anything, I haven’t hopped distribution since I started using Tumbleweed a few years ago.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

I heard about Salt being better alternative than Ansible. Why? I see.

Takios ,
@Takios@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

The clear cut of state data, pillar data and formulae feels more intuitive to me than Ansible’s playbook organization.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

For person using only Ansible I don’t know what are you talking about. 😆

vrighter ,

ansible claims to be lots of things it’s not. It’s supposed to be idempotent. It’s not, you can execute arbitrary scripts. You don’t need an agent on the machines… but it might just decide to stop supporting your version of python one day. It’s okayish for setting up some machines, but absolutely sucks for maintaining them.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

I agree.

thurstylark ,

I use vcsh and myrepos.

vcsh allows you to run multiple git repos that share ~ as their root, and mr simplifies/automates the management of those multiple repos. You can check out my setup here.

pinganini ,

@Psyhackological I've cut the Gordian knot by running one distro everywhere

data1701d ,
@data1701d@startrek.website avatar

I’ll be frank - I never have, though I probably should. For me, if an application’s configuration ever annoys me enough, I just manually copy the config from a machine that I already did the config.

One day, I may set up a shell script based on Debian’s Debootstrap that feeds it a list of packages (I think you can provide it a text file with a list of packages) to get everything set up, but that day is not today.

demesisx ,
@demesisx@infosec.pub avatar

Perhaps you’re tired of hearing it but this is very close to exactly how NixOS works with home manager.

data1701d ,
@data1701d@startrek.website avatar

Quite honestly, I almost chose NixOS over Debian a few years for that reason, but I prefer the community support of Debian. Of course, that could change, but right now, I’m not in a big distro-hopping mood nor am I sufficiently unhappy with Debian. On a side note, it kind of bothered me that you couldn’t use Nix to configure e.g the layout of your XFCE desktop. If I ever transition, maybe I’ll put in some time one summer to make that all work.

ipkpjersi ,

I have a Linux setup script that downloads a bunch of config files and sets them up. I also have backups of my zshrc and other configs, and that helps a ton too. I have a Linux scripts repo on GitHub where I toss all my Linux scripts and that’s quite helpful too.

possiblylinux127 ,

No Ansible?

ipkpjersi ,

Nope. I’m more of a dev than a sysadmin these days, pretty much always have been, so I never bothered learning something like Ansible or Puppet or Chef etc. A couple Bash scripts can get me nearly entirely set up so it’s all I ever really needed.

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