workstation

An Ansible playbook (and role) which installs most of the software I use (on an Ubuntu flavored OS), to save me several hours worth of setup time on a new workstation.

Used on

• Ubuntu 18.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Pop!_OS 22.04 (Uses the same recipe dir as Ubuntu 22.04)

Assumptions

You have a brand-new Ubuntu flavored OS, with absolute stock defaults.

How to use it

1. Clone this repo:

   sudo apt-get install -yq git
   mkdir -pv "$HOME/repos/github.com/dale-c-anderson"
   cd "$HOME/repos/github.com/dale-c-anderson"
   git clone https://github.com/dale-c-anderson/workstation
   cd workstation

2. Have a look inside recipes/ folder, and examine each one's group_vars/all.yml file. If one of the recipes suits your needs, proceed to step 3. Otherwise, duplicate or modify one of the recipes as needed.

3. Run the bootstrap script, specifying the relative path of the recipe dir to use:

   sudo ./bootstrap recipes/Ubuntu_22.04

   • The bootstrap script installs ansible, downloads the contrib roles specified in galaxy/requirements.yml, and runs ansible-playbook for the recipe you chose.
   • The script should be run with sudo, as opposed to logging in as root, because some of the stuff installed will be to your own ~/bin directory.

Followup

After the playbook installs software, you'll need to do the following manually:

• log in to browser profiles (chrome, firefox, etc)
• log in to cloud services (g-suite, microsoft teams, etc)
• generate new ssh keys and add them to services (github, gitlab, etc)
• add your ssh key(s) to your ssh agent
• log in to IDE profiles (jetbrains, vscode, etc)
• set up a new GPG key and configure code signing
• clone private repositories
• configure dropbox or other cloud storage services
• configure credentials for API services (aws, kubectl, etc)
• log in to public and/or private docker registries
• configure local system backups

Updating the contrib roles

If you ever need to re-use this playbook and you still have the repo in place, it's a good idea to update the roles first.

Sadly, Galaxy doesn't really have any facility to update roles, so the easiest way is to remove and reinstall them.

1. Purge previously downloded contrib roles,

   cd path/to/this/repo
   find ./roles/contrib/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs rm -rfv

2. Install fresh verions,

   ansible-galaxy install -r ./galaxy/requirements.yml