Tiercel

I have a little Raspberry Pi that I use as a personal server. I store my music, photos and movies there. It runs as a torrent client to share files with friends.

My server crashed recently. The power went out, and the little SD card that hosts the main filesystem ended up getting corrupted. I decided to use this as an opportunity to automate the setup process. Hopefully this will be useful to someone else who wants to quickly set up a tiny Raspberry Pi based server.

How to Use This Thing

• Make sure you have Ansible installed. I use OSX and I'm a fan of using Homebrew to manage packages. To get Ansible, run the following:

  brew install ansible

• Clone this repo! Use git to download this onto your machine.

  git clone git@github.com:waltz/tiercel.git

• Tell Ansible which computer we should configure. Copy the hosts.example file to hosts in this project directory. Replace the default text with an IP address or hostname of the machine you'd like to configure.

  cp hosts.example hosts

• Set some settings. What should your computer be called? Passwords for your BitTorrent client? They're all in the variables configuration file. Copy over the example file, and then replace the defaults with values that work for your situation.

  cp vars/defaults.yml.sample vars/defaults.yml

• Now that we have everything configured, it's time to put it all together. Now we tell Ansible to run our instructions on the computers that we have told it about.

  ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

• There you go! After running that command you will see a list of things that Ansible did on your new server. It's all ready for prime time!