Provisioning Laptop(s) With Ansible
Setting up a new laptop manually takes a lot of time and there is a good chance of forgetting tweaks made to configuration files. It is good idea to automate it via a shell script or using configuration management tools like Ansible. It also makes easy to sync configuration across multiple systems.
Why Ansible?
Ansible is lightweight and provides only a thin layer of abstraction. It connects to hosts via ssh and pushes changes. So, there is no need to setup anything on remote hosts.
Writing A Playbook
You should check out Ansible documentation to get familiar with ansible and writing playbooks. Ansible uses yaml format for playbooks and it's human readable. Here is a simple playbook to install redis on ubuntu server.
hosts: all sudo: True tasks: - name: install redis apt: name=redis-server update_cache=yes
Here is a playbook which I use to configure my laptop. As the playbook needs to run locally, just run
ansible-playbook laptop-setup.yml -i localhost, -c local
Bootstrap Script
To automate provisioning, a bootstrap script is required to make sure python, ansible are installed, to download and execute playbook on the system.
sudo apt update --yes sudo apt install --yes python python-pip sudo apt install --yes libssl-dev sudo -H pip install ansible wget -c https://path/to/playbook.yml sudo ansible-playbook setup.yml -i localhost, -c local
Now, to provision a laptop, just run the bootstrap script.
sh -c "$(wget https://path/to/bootstrap_script.sh"
You can use a git repo to track changes in playbook and bootstrap script. If you are using multiple laptops, running bootstrap script on them will make sure everything is synced across them.