Set of Ansible playbooks to provision a Fedora machine with all my applications and settings.

Setup a new machine from scratch is always a very time consuming task. Last time I did it, it took an entire weekend to install everything.

And there is a high change of forget some less used command line tool. Also as the Developer I install many tools directly from GitHub and so checking if they are updated is a very manual process, like going to GitHub, check latest release, download the binary and move it to the correct place.

What if most of this setup, can be automated? That´s where Ansible and this reposiory comes in.

• A machine running Fedora OS. This playbook was tested with Fedora 38
• Git (dnf install -y git)
• GitHub personal access token. You can get one here.

• Initial system update.
• Install Dotfiles from my private dotfiles repository, using Yet Another Dotfiles Manager - yadm
• Install all my applications. Check APPLICATIONS.md for a detailed list.

To provision a new machine open a terminal window and run the following commands:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=<my_github_token>
git clone https://github.com/brpaz/my-linux-setup
sudo chmod +x setup.sh
./setup.sh

Note When installing dotfiles you will be prompted for the "pgp" key to decrypt the secure files. Make sure to have it at hand.

Unfortunately not everything can be automated and some manual steps will be required after running this scripts.

The Ansible playbook syncs mostly of the dotfiles. Still, user data like Pictures, Music etc, must be restored manually from backup.

To do so, you can run the [scripts/restore_home.sh] script.

sudo chmod +x scripts/restore_home.sh
BACKUP_PATH=/path/to/home/backup scripts/restore_home.sh

This will rsync the most important folders like Documents, Video, Music, Code etc from the specified backup location.

The setup should have installed systemd units to backup the system using Restic, both to Backblaze B2 and to external NAS. These units are disabled by default, for better control, since we don´t want to start backup, until we have restored our files.

To enable the restic backups, run the following commands on your terminal:

systemctl --user enable restic-nas-backup.timer
systemctl --user enable restic-nas-prune.timer
systemctl --user enable restic-b2-backup.timer
systemctl --user enable restic-b2-prune.timer

I use WebCatalog to allow easy installation of web applications.

I have the following:

• Feedly
• Instagram
• Google Keep
• Google Photos
• Fast
• TickTick
• ProtonMail

In order to be able to backup the machine and access the files stored on the home NAS, we should mount their folders using NFS.

For that, first make sure you have nfs installed on your machine.

Then we can try to mount the volumes manually, using:

sudo mkdir /mnt/qnap-media
sudo mkdir /mnt/qnap-backups
sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.108:/Multimedia /mnt/qnap-media

If the test is successfull, we can now instruct the system to mount the volumes automatically on boot, by adding the following lines to the /etc/fstab file:

192.168.1.108:/Multimedia /mnt/qnap-media  nfs      defaults,nofail,nobootwait,noauto,x-systemd.automount    0       0
192.168.1.108:/Backups /mnt/qnap-backups  nfs      defaults,nofail,nobootwait,noauto,x-systemd.automount    0       0

Replace the IP Address and mount path accordingly.

• [] Execute Jetbrains toolbox and install the IDEs. (DataGrip, Goland, IDEA, PHPStorm, WebStorm, CLion, Android Studio).
• [] Open Chrome and Firefox browsers and login to start syncing all the extensions, bookmarks etc.
• [] Enable Restic Backups
• [] Login into applications (Gnome Accounts, Spotify, etc).
• [] Configure Pika Backup

Most of the tasks are idenpotent and you can use this playbook to keep your system updated. This is useful, for example, to automatically update all the programs installed from GitHub, as the playbooks will try to fetch and install always the latest release.

You can execute a specific tag, by running:

 TAG=node task run-tag

TAG=github task run-tag

• http:https://radeksprta.eu/automatically-setup-computer-ansible-playbook/
• http:https://blog.josephkahn.io/articles/ansible/
• https://github.com/Benoth/ansible-ubuntu

👤 Bruno Paz

• Website: brunopaz.dev
• Github: @brpaz

Copyright © 2019 Bruno Paz.

This project is MIT licensed.