I love tinkering with my homelab but there is always a fear in the back of my mind, that one of my servers is running an outdated package that is being actively exploited. I don’t want to spend my free time cleaning up a mess that some nefarious party has made of my servers and network; I want to tinker! I like to keep everything up to date to prevent that, but I hate having to navigate my way into each and every server to run the updates manually. I’m a fan of automating anything that I have to do more than a couple times so I started researching Ansible.
If you’re doing any sort of server management or application deployment, you really ought to be looking into using this tool. It’s simple to get setup with and once you put in the initial time investment, it will undoubtedly save you time. Now when I want to update all of my servers, I can run two commands from my terminal. But it doesn’t just stop at updating servers, oh no. If I want to create a new server, it’s a matter of copying/pasting an existing configuration from one of my “playbooks,” changing a couple variables, and running the playbook. Just like that, I’ve got a brand new server running on my network.
By now, you agreed that Ansible is great and you should be using it, so how can you get started? I’ve got a repo setup on Github where I’ve shared what I have so far. If you’re looking to start using Ansible to automate Proxmox, I’ve done some of the heavy lifting already. A lot of what I have there, is taken from Nathan Curry’s post on his website. Give that a read first, then come back to my repo where you can tweak to your heart’s desire.
