this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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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?

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[–] dontsayaword@piefed.social 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.