AnsibleLaptop

Reproducible Developer Laptop configuration with Ansible

Motivation

I want to demote my laptop from being a "pet" to being "cattle". I will not lovingly nurture and feed my laptop with hand-crafted customizations and idiosyncratic non-standard installed software. My laptop is here to be used for a job, and if I lose it or a disk crashes, I should be able to simply replace it and reproduce its setup quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

Principles

1. No hand installing of software, editing system files, or customization.
2. Use containers as much as possible in preference to installing software on the host system.
3. Use Ansible playbooks (stored in this repo) exclusively for all system level installs and configuration.
4. User files (/home) to be backed up to a cloud backup solution of your choice.

The Goal

With the above in place, if the laptop falls in a river, no big deal. Get another laptop, apply the minimal install, run the Ansible playbooks here and restore your user data.

Quick Start

• Install the latest version of Fedora Workstation from here

• During the installation:

  • Set your root password.
  • Create your own user account and make it an administrator account (so you can sudo and ansible commands can elevate permissions)

• Once the installation completes, log in as the user you just created and run this command:

    curl -fsSL https://github.com/ksylvan/AnsibleLaptop/raw/master/bootstrap/clone | sh
  

• Follow the instructions that the script prints on the screen to proceed.

Variables

Once you run the clone script and follow the instructions, you will have an AnsibleLaptop directory in your home directory and a new ${HOME}/.ansible_laptop/setup.yml with variables you can set:

Name	Explanation
docker_selinux	For Fedora 24, set this to permissive
docker_testing	For Fedora 24, set this to True
my_yum_repos	List of extra repositories
my_packages	List of packages to install

The variable my_yum_repos contains information for setting up external repositories (such as google-chrome). For example:

my_yum_repos:
  google-chrome:
    description: 'Google Chrome Repository'
    baseurl: http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/$basearch
    enabled: 1
    gpgcheck: 1
    gpgkey: https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

The above will create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo which enables the standard google chrome yum repository.

The my_packages hash contains a list of names (as recognized by the dnf command), or URLs to files, for example, to install sshfs, screen, google-chrome-stable and the atom editor, use the following snippet.

my_packages:
  names:
    - sshfs
    - screen
    - google-chrome-stable
  urls:
    - https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.8.0/atom.x86_64.rpm

Note that the above assumes that we already installed the google-chrome yum repo via the my_yum_repos declaration.

Note: Packages specified by their download links are downloaded once and cached in the ./cache directory. To cause a package to be re-downloaded, simply remove it from this directory. To purge this cache completely, simply remove this direcory, or run make clean

The Local Play Book

In addition to the variables above, you can have your own local.yml which is read and executed only if it exists. This file captures other system modification. Use it to add users, change web configuration files, modify LDAP or other server setup, etc.

The point is to never modify your setup without the aid of Ansible. The local.yml file allows you to capture decisions and changes you make that are not already covered by the AnsibleLaptop process.

An example local.yml:

---
- name: Local Tasks
  hosts: laptop
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Hello!
      debug: msg='Here I am! LOCAL playbook'
    - name: 'SELinux open VPN config'
      seboolean: name=openvpn_can_network_connect state=yes

Backing up and restoring your configuration

The files which contain all the information needed to save and restore your setup are:

• ~/.ansible_laptop/setup.yml - The variables that determine which yum repos and packages are installed on your machine.
• ~/.ansible_laptop/local.yml - Other customizations you created.

Demos

• On a newly instantiated Fedora 23 workstation install

• On a Fedora 24 system, with SELinux changes for Docker

• Using a local.yml playbook to manage ~/.bashrc