Ansible VS GNU Stow

Ansible GitHub Repository

Ansible is an open-source tool that excels in infrastructure configuration. With an agentless architecture (no services need to be installed on the managed machines), it communicates with machines over SSH.

Visit the repository for code and examples.

I do believe that using containers makes a ton of sense in writing data pipelines. You can use the same image to develop and run the pipeline, preventing "it works on my machine" issues. You can test different variations of the image without having to stand up additional infrastructure or potentially breaking the workflows of others who're using the same infrastructure. Finally, knowledge of containerization is increasingly expected of all engineers, while knowledge of other tools that solve similar issues (like Vagrant or Ansible) is less common.

Bearing in mind that YAML is still used widely in build and testing production-level environments, it proves to be an essential tool for managing configurations and data interchange. Its readability and flexibility make it a popular choice for defining automation scripts in Ansible , where it streamlines IT task automation. Similarly, YAML's role in Github Workflows facilitates the configuration of CI/CD pipelines, making testing and deployments more efficient. The continued evolution and integration of YAML in these critical areas underscore its ongoing relevance and effectiveness in simplifying complex workflows and configurations. For me, if it works, the it is not a failure.

2. Ansible with AI-Powered Automation

8. Ansible

In my previous article I went over how to set up VMs in Proxmox VE using Terraform to deploy the VMs and Cloud-Init to provision them. In this article I'll discuss using Ansible playbooks to do further provisioning of VMs.

You might notice that the Terraform template definition is pretty close in structure to the one I used in my last article. That's intentional - I set up the last one with cloud-init, but didn't do much with it. This one actually provisions the VM with cloud-init. You can also use Ansible playbooks to provision a VM, and I might talk about that in a future post, but in my next post I'm going to talk about doing something actually useful in my home infrastructure and setting up Plex.

Sorry - should have been specific in top-level comment. I was referring to this one: https://github.com/aspiers/stow/issues/33

Basically, the --dotfiles option was not working with directories so you had to have things that look like this: lazygit/.config/lazygit and now it looks like: lazygit/dot-config/lazygit.

Really a small issue that bugged me forever - shouldn't have made it seem like it was core a problem with stow!

I use GNU Stow to symlink many shell and configuration files from a repository. It works so well and there are many webpages out there from people telling you how it's the best way to manage dotfiles.

Gnu Stow

Too bad that's broken for directory names: https://github.com/aspiers/stow/issues/33