jtmoulia

The current Ansible driven configuration is the latest in a series of attempts. Initally I copied some dotfiles from computer to computer, using USB sticks, emails, and scp to set up bespoke environments based on what I needed. To share and version the dotfiles across system jtmoulia/dotfiles was committed back in 2012. I symlinked everything into my home directory using

This worked great until I wanted to do anything more complicated than just symlinking files right into the home directory, like, say the basic tasks of copying in a file (symlinks don’t work for all dotfiles) or symlinking a file into ~/.config. As these issues were addressed the bash script grew into a monster Makefile that could copy, symlink, and backup multiple layers of files.

With the Makefile I could unpack some files and symlinks into my target system, but that was the extent of it. That finally brings us to why Ansible. Ansible allows installing files anywhere into the system as well as all sorts of other configuration tasks. It’s like make, but the target state isn’t limited to the existence of a file: the “targets” range from running a service to inserting a line into a file. The task definitions are a bit verbose, but super clear as to their intent. Beween roles and playbooks Ansible lets you layer tasks any way necessary.

If you already have Pipenv installed you can quickly pull down the repo and install the required Python dependencies (Ansible):

  git checkout https://github.com/jtmoulia/dotfiles ~/.dotfiles
  cd ~/.dotfiles
  pipenv install

With the dependencies installed into a virtual environment you can now execute your configuration:

  ./bin/dotsible.sh

This will install the basic configuration, including a helper script, dotsible, to quickly run ~/dotfiles/bin/dotsible.sh

If you’re familiar with Ansible it’s simple to add new functionality (via roles) and target environments (via playbooks). Read more in the jtmoulia/dotfiles README.