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Laying the Groundwork

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
– Henry Ford

As it's inevitable to mess up your system, it's better to start working on a disposable machine. Following are some of the options, set up whichever you are comfortable with.

  • Virtual Machine
  • WSL2
  • Docker
  • A second laptop

For now, I would recommend installing Ubuntu.

A Fresh Start

Create a simple GitHub Repository and clone that to your machine. To make the repo hidden, you can add a dot before the repo name. For instance, use .dotfiles instead of dotfiles.

Installing Ansible

It's pretty easy to install Ansible. For Ubuntu, all you need is to run the following command.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

To verify that you have installed ansible successfully, use the following command.

ansible --version

But we have a tiny problem. What if you mess this the setup and you need to start fresh? Do you wish to install it manually again? I hope not.

Automate the Ansible Installation

I prefer to automate this as well. So, let's create a directory within our repo and call it bin. This is where we will keep all the bash scripts. Create a bash script file called install.sh.

├── bin
│   └── install.sh

We can simply put the installation command in this file, but let's make it slightly better. If you recall the first thing you did after a fresh installation of Ubuntu, you had to update and upgrade your system. So let's put that in the install.sh file as well.

# Update and upgrade packages
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

# Install Ansible
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

If you try to run this script, it will throw an error. We need to make it executable.

# .dotfiles/bin
sudo chmod +x install.sh

Now, we can easily execute it.

# .dotfiles/bin
sudo install.sh

The Directory Structure

I recommend a simple directory structure to begin with.

.
├── ansible.cfg
├── bin
│   └── install.sh
├── inventory.yml
├── playbook.yml
├── roles
│   └── tool
│       ├── tasks
│       │   └── main.yml
│       ├── files
│       │   └── config_file_for_the_tool
│       └── templates
│           └── zshrc.j2
└── vars.yml

References