Hello, I have recently been seeing a boom in people using ansible for automating setting up vps’s, services, …
Is it worth it to learn ansible to do also automate the way I setup everything, or is a bash script good enough ( I know some bash scripting but ansible seems like it could be more worth the time to learn )?
Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.
Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are “idempotent” which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.
The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.