.emacs.d VS dockerfiles

--- - name: Emacs setup - Containerized hosts: all vars: ansible_bender: base_image: python:3.9-slim-bullseye target_image: name: myemacs cmd: bash user: themkat working_dir: /home/themkat pre_tasks: - name: Update package archives (Debian-based) apt: update_cache: true cache_valid_time: 7200 when: ansible_os_family == "Debian" tasks: - name: Make sure Emacs and git is installed package: name: - emacs - git state: present - name: Create themkat user user: name: themkat create_home: true state: present # had issues with using the home symbol + become_user here. Might be an issue to look out for - name: Download Emacs config #become_user: themkat git: repo: https://github.com/themkat/.emacs.d.git dest: /home/themkat/.emacs.d - name: Make themkat the owner file: path: /home/themkat/.emacs.d owner: themkat recurse: true state: directory

In the last article, building container images with Ansible was briefly discussed. An external blog article on that very subject was linked to, and if you read it you may have seen a lot of manual steps using Docker- and Buildah-commands. This seems like a lot of boiler plate code just to make container images with Ansible, right? From that idea, ansible-bender was born! Ansible-Bender uses Buildah to build your images, and Podman to handle them (some commands like pushing images, build logs, inspecting images etc. are included into Ansible-Bender). Buildah is a container image builder that does not depend on any external programs, and can build containers for any container runtime. A very big downside is that it's only supported on GNU/Linux-based systems, which is bad news if you are using Mac OS X (or god forbid if you are one of the Windows users, ugh). To combat this issue I made a Docker image that includes Buildah and all dependencies, that can be used to run Ansible-Bender on other platforms. Might be a bit slower than just using it on a GNU/Linux-based system, but beats not being able to use it at all!