Awesome

Perfect Linux machine setup with Ansible

In 2020, having a Linux IaaS machine configured and setup should be easy and fast: after all, it's the basic task anybody has to do in order to start working on more-meaningful and productive activities.

However, this is not always the case: you work in different environments (different cloud providers, on-premises environments, lab environments) where you have different base images and different tools, and creating the very same machine is still quite a daunting - or at least time-consuming - task.

This project aims to solve that, by providing a boilerplate yet complete and easy-to-use and easy-to-customize way to spin up your own Linux machine.

Usage

You will need Ansible on your workstation in order to run this project, and you will need to first install a base Linux image on your target system. The target system can be a Debian-based system or an Ubuntu-based system, since the apt package is used.

You can start the fun with the install.sh script which takes in input the hostname to configure.

In the output, you will receive the passwords for the default user and the root user. The script will add your local SSH keys as trusted keys for remote login, and will harden the Linux installation quite a bit. In the end, you will also have several utilities installed and a Docker daemon.

The playbook also uses the olivomarco/dotfiles repo in order to setup a custom and productive shell for the users of the system.

Parameters

Please note that some of the parameters provided by this template repo MUST BE CHANGED before running the script.

Customization starts by modifying files in this folder. In particular, consider that:

• in all.yml you must modify the default_username variable
• in all.yml you must modify the dot_forward_email variable
• the vault.yml is an ansible-vault encrypted file (default password: secretpassword) which you must customize with your SMTP parameters

Final notes

You can, of course, customize everything and add your own tools and configurations: if you think you have found something useful which can be beneficial to any user using this package, please open a feature request and I will gladly evaluate it.