Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?

Just use Ansible for your personal computer.

I'm in a similar situation (3 different workstations that should have the same config) and tried to solve it with all major config management solutions (Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack) and also tried using a Bash script. While config management works perfectly at my workplace (for real servers), I found all of them way to complicated and slow to maintain my workstations.

In the end I switched to use a plain Git-managed makefile which works perfectly for me, because:

- Plain and simple syntax, single file

- Shell autocompletion for Makefile targets, if I only want to install a small set

- No need to write cfg management "modules" as I can achieve the same with minimal Bash scripting

This is how my config looks currently: https://gist.github.com/ifischer/5fdd672aeed1099c1f6c6ea925c...

Like everybody else here on the top-level comments, I've also wrote a tool for that :-)

It's a wrapper for things like Ansible, Terraform, shell-scripts etc (Ansible is the only one with a working implementation so far), with the goal for you to be able to describe your setup in an easy, minimal & composable way, within a single file (well, data-structure, really). That file and one binary is all that is needed to re-create your setup on a new target (which can be a physical or virtual machine, container image, remote server, etc.):

https://freckles.io

I recently started doing this. I'm using GNU Stow plus Git to maintain my dotfiles and scripts (one thing I do in scripts is check uname to decide if its macOS or Linux). You could use Gitlab, GitHub, or host your own Git (e.g. reachable via WireGuard). Furthermore, I use Topgrade [1] to maintain most machines. It abstracts Homebrew, APT, Vim Plug, Pip, Cargo, and a plethora of other software management tools. I keep a spreadsheet to write down changes I make on a system, and then allow myself to cross which machines also have this change.

This all works well for me, and my Macs have TimeMachine, which is synced over WLAN at home network. However my Linux machines don't have such luxury (referring to the UI here). So you might want to look into a Linux alternative for that, or use a system with that in mind such as Btrfs, ZFS, or indeed (as per other comments) NixOS.

[EDIT]I'd like to add that some of my (virtual) machines -such as for example the ones running Kali- only have read access to certain Git repositories, and no access at all on other.[/EDIT]

[1] https://github.com/r-darwish/topgrade

I've recently employed a docker-based strategy for this. I work for multiple clients, some of whom go months between giving me work.

Each client has their own docker-compose setup on my machine - and I have a secondary machine that I rsync the dockerfiles and some supporting scripts[1] over to for out-and-about. I have a couple of scripts for generating the docker templates for new projects.

This means I only need to manually set up three things on a new machine: Docker, a password manager, and a text editor (I'm using Atom, but Vimmers / Emaxions could probably roll this into the template generator)

Depending on how locked-down your setup is, you might find that as time goes on and distros go out of support, you need to update your dockerfiles - but I think you'd need to make those kinds of tweaks with any system.

Note that I no longer advocate a dockerfile per-project, but per-client (or some other sub-structure) - that way, production dockerfiles don't interfere with developer dockerfiles. Some day, I'd like to experiment with "sidecar" containers instead... some serious advantages there.

[1] Supporting scripts include the templates, a few bash aliases, an easy way to find the ip of a docker machine, an easy way to open a bash shell within a docker container, etc.