Member OP
Sorry if this is a dumb question but what do you use for automated server provisioning without Ansible? I only have three boxes and it feels like overkill.
I looked at Puppet and Chef too and theyre all so heavy... is there something lighter I dont know about?
Thanks everyone!
Ansible is agentless and already lighter than Puppet or Chef, but I understand the sentiment for three hosts. Consider that your complexity threshold is low enough that parallel SSH with a small shell library may suffice.
For my edge PoPs I maintain a 200-line POSIX shell framework deployed since 2016. It uses rsync-over-ssh for file distribution and a simple manifest format: one file per host, key-value pairs for packages, users, and templated configs. No daemon, no Python dependency, no YAML.
The tradeoff is error handling. You lose idempotency guarantees unless you implement them yourself. For three boxes, this is manageable. For thirty, you will rebuild Ansible or migrate to it.
Simple is better:
Three boxes need only ssh and a for loop
Member
Whats the deal on that shell framework tho george is it a steal or what
I dont trust free trials for automation but if its just shell I can audit it myself
Price-per-GB on my time matters here
Member
Hey folks gonna be real I tried the for loop thing on 5 boxes and totally borked one firewall config
Super stoked I had backups tho
@GeorgeNmp your 200-liner handle rollback or nah
Member
I use makefiles for everything including raid configs single command deploys no exceptions
Which OS are the three boxes running
Member OP
All three are Debian 12. Should have mentioned that, sorry!
Then just use cloud-init with Debian. Write your config once, feed it on reinstall, done. No ongoing agent, no inventory.
Member
Cloud-init is just for first boot tho right? Or you re-running it somehow
