Beginning to Write Ansible Roles

At my job we have been using Ansible to manage our infrastructure for a number of years now. Through it all I have learned a lot about best practices and a great appreciation for the Ansible infrastructure. I have also become increasingly dissatisfied at home where I am still managing my home server the old-school manual way. This has left me with a home server running all sorts of stuff, in all sorts of ways, that I have no memory of how or why I did it. There also exists no documentation that would be critical for reproducing my infrastructure if my server failed.

With everything I have running on the server it is starting to reach its capacity of what it can do. Last week I propped up a new machine running Ubuntu 18.04 that is sitting right next to it. Aside from a default install I have not touched it. Instead I have been working on a new Ansible role that will take care of all of the initial configurations I would normally make. I have been testing this role on a virtual machine. Last night I fixed a large number of bugs, and made lots of tweaks and it is now almost completely ready to tag as a v1.0 release.

Once I have confidence that this does its job well I will begin writing Ansible roles for all of the software and services that I will deploy to this machine. My goal is to have a wealth of quality Ansible roles under my namespace in Ansible Galaxy where quality roles do not already exist.

This new role is named maxolasersquad/base_machine and can be found at https://galaxy.ansible.com/maxolasersquad/base_machine.