Ansible VS Home Manager using Nix

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.

While I don't use NixOS or home-manager, I would imagine this provides some extra value: i.e. config is versioned or easy to move between machines.

Curiosity got the better of me so I looked it up at https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/ and it indeed does purport to provide benefits I guessed at and then some.

Whether that's better than just manually managing things yourself is altogether a different matter.

Nix Home Manager is a tool for managing a user environment with Nix. It already has a nice way to install and configure gh with the programs.gh option:

The data definition and operational model of SOPS is well suited for a Nix-powered system. sops-nix offers both NixOS and Nix Home Manager modules which provide a declarative way to manage secrets using SOPS.

There is also nix-on-droid[1] which is a fork of Termux allowing you to manage your environment with nix (similar to home-manager[2])

[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-on-droid

[2]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager