I am working on setting up a home server but I want it to be reproducible if I need to make large changes, switch out hardware, or restore from a failure. What do you use to handle this?
The place I work at uses chef so I use cinc to manage my vms and proxmox host.
Using Forgejo as a base is really nice.
Git controlled docker-compose files and backed up docker data volumes.pretty easy to go back to a point in time.
That’s actually a really good idea. From now on I will do the same. Thanks!
Yay i satisfied big chungus!
I used to have a fille with every cli command and notes on how each thing was set up. When I had to reinstall it from scratch it took all day going through lots of manual steps and remembering how it should all go.
Recently I converted the whole thing to Ansible. Now I could rebuild my entire system on a brand new OS installation with one command that completes in minutes. It’s all modular and I can add new services easily whether they are docker containers or scripts or whatever. If I ever break anything, it will reset everything to its intended state and leave it alone otherwise. And it’s free and pretty easy to learn and start using.
Plus I use git along with it for version control, so I can always revert to any previous configuration instantly.
NixOS for configuration and restic for data
Incus and ansible
NixOS
Out of curiosity: Are you running nix-ops with nix-secrets or how did you cover orchestration & credentials?
I use flakes and all hosts are configured from a single flake, where each host has its own configuration. I have some custom modules and even custom package in the same flake. I also use home manager. I have 4 hosts managed in total: home server, laptop, gaming PC, and a cloud server. All hosts were provisioned using nixos-anywhere + disko, except for the first one which was installed manually. For secrets I use sops-nix, encrypted secrets are stored in the same flake/repo.
Currently I’m migrating from compose.y(a)ml to terraform. I’m using proxmox -> 2x VM -> docker swarm. I will soon try to engineer a solution to quickly scale up and down any service I want using the same terraform codebase with rundeck. I have my configs as terraform templates and it gets deployed as a swarm config (or secret), then mapped to the container the same way.
Terraform and ansible. Script service configuration and use source control. Containerize services where possible to make them system agnostic.
How do you decide what’s for Terraform and what’s for Ansible?
They’re good at different things.
Terraform is better at “here is a configuration file - make my infrastructure look like it” and Ansible is better at “do these things on these servers”.
In my case I use Terraform to create proxmox VMs and then Ansible provisions and configures software on those VMs.
