My Laptop Provision scripts

Set of Ansible playbooks to provision my Linux machines with all my applications and settings.

Motivation

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 chance I forgot someting, that I not use everyday. Also as the Developer I install many tools directly from GitHub and so checking if for new versions 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.

Pre-requisites

• The inventories/personal/hosts.ini inventory.
• Fedora for tuxedo-laptop or Arch Linux for zenbook-laptop.
• GitHub personal access token. You can get one here.

What is included

• 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.

Inventories

The repo now uses a single inventory for personal machines:

• inventories/personal/hosts.ini

The inventory defines shared variables plus a laptops group and separate host vars for each machine:

• group_vars/all.yml for shared variables used by all personal machines
• group_vars/laptops.yml for shared laptop variables
• host_vars/tuxedo-laptop.yml
• host_vars/zenbook-laptop.yml

This keeps shared variables in inventory group vars, machine-specific values in host vars, and makes it easier to add more personal machines later.

Provision a new machine

To provision the tuxedo-laptop, open a terminal window and run the following commands:

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

To provision the zenbook-laptop:

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

You can also run playbooks directly with an explicit inventory:

ansible-playbook -i inventories/personal/hosts.ini --limit tuxedo-laptop playbooks/tuxedo.yml --ask-become-pass
ansible-playbook -i inventories/personal/hosts.ini --limit tuxedo-laptop playbooks/dotfiles.yml --ask-become-pass
ansible-playbook -i inventories/personal/hosts.ini --limit tuxedo-laptop playbooks/setup.yml --ask-become-pass

ansible-playbook -i inventories/personal/hosts.ini --limit zenbook-laptop playbooks/zenbook.yml --ask-become-pass

To add a remote machine later, add it to inventories/personal/hosts.ini, place common variables in the right group vars file, and put machine-specific values in host_vars/<host>.yml.

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

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Post install steps

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

Restoring $HOME directory from backup

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.

Manual Apps install

AppImages (with GearLever)

• WebCatalog Desktop for Mac, Windows, Linux - WebCatalog
• script-kit/app
• Proxyman Proxyman - macOS, iOS, Windows and Linux
• heyman/heynote: A dedicated scratchpad for developers

WebCatalog

• Instagram
• Immich
• ChatGPT
• Excalidraw | Hand-drawn look & feel • Collaborative • Secure
• Online FlowChart & Diagrams Editor - Mermaid Live Editor

Others

• Download · Tailscale
• pop-os/shell: Pop!_OS Shell

Other tasks

• [] 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.
• [] Login into applications (Gnome Accounts, Spotify, etc).
• [] Configure Pika Backup

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Keep the system updated

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

Keep GitHub installed software updated

TAG=github task run-tag

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Reference

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

Author

👤 Bruno Paz

• Website: brunopaz.dev
• Github: @brpaz

📝 License

Copyright © 2019 Bruno Paz.

This project is MIT licensed.