Does ansible make sense to create an entire homelab in one vm?
reddit / selfhosted

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Generic_User48579 · 2023-12-29 16:41

Hey guys,

I have ubuntu desktop running on my server. I made basic configuration
changes, small stuff like turning remote desktop on. I have loads of
services running as docker containers with portainer. I have LinuxGSM
servers running on my server directly. I created 6-8 nfs shares from
my NAS to my Server. I modified my firewall.
This is already quite a bit of customizing. Now I also want to expose
some services to the internet, which means I want to harden my server
first, which means even more customization.


I thought it would be great if I could automate all this so that I can
nuke my server and rebuild it at my leisure, without going through all
the configurations manually again and forgetting stuff.
Ive heard of ansible and thought that sounds great. But then I noticed
it only seems to work to deploy VMs? Idk why but I somehow thought
ansible would enable me to completely re-setup my server, when its
stupid because obviously ansible needs to run on *something.*


But I don't want to have many vms running. Sure I could use some linux
vms to play around with sometimes but in general I just want my one
server, and have that be build automatically. How do I do that and
does it even make sense to do so?


To completely build my server from scratch with ansible I understand I
would need to have some os running on my server, and then basically
create my server from there in one singular vm.
I guess I could make the configurations on the host os as minimal as
possible and then just do everything through the vm, even though I
would have preferred if ansible just builds the host OS to my
configurations. But seems thats not possible.


But I worry about security, annoying changes that I have to make to
the host os, etc etc.
Does this sound doable and reasonable? Or are there better options?


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