It may seem like overkill, but I learnt how to use ansible to manage the software on my pi. I've actually just upgraded my rpi4 to use an ssd so am choosing to start from scratch. I'm hoping my ansible playbooks are written well.
Haha, yeah, that’s a good point. I may still have some ansible playbook from a while ago but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be up to date. I guess it would be nice to have a system like CoreOS was, where you just provide a setup script, systemd unit files, and at runtime most of the file system is expected to be read-only. That way you’re confident you keep all your setup in a git repo and on reboot the whole thing is reset (outside of data stores).
It’s just so tempting to quickly ssh into the machine to hack something around, then you forget about it b cause it ~works.
But a rpi4 can run containers, so that may also be an alternative.
I've been trying (and failing) to get my ansible playbooks to work for about 2 hours - so definitely not a perfect solution by any stretch. This reminds me why I don't daily drive a linux machine! I don't know why I'm encountering so many errors around installing docker-compose, pip, apt packages etc.
I suspect ansible may be a better solution for when you're using it to build machines from scratch very frequently, and you'd have more of a chance to maintain and ensure they're working over time vs once every couple of years.
The other annoying thing with ansible is that while it may install the software, it can't log me in. So still having to manually sign in to syncthing/tailscale etc even after the software is installed.
