!rant

I have multiple (similar) linux environments on which I work. How do you guys manage installed packages and configurations across them?

What I'm going to do soon to deal with this very thing:

Private git repo:
* Config files
* List of packages installed
* Script responsible for installing all those packages and copying configs
* Maybe a script that updates that list of installed packages

Depends, at work I use saltstack, but we are building our own system to manage that.

For my private servers, almost everything is automated. And if I need to do something on one or more, I only use SSH (or CSSH)

Chef

I have a small home lab on my network. Because I use mostly ubuntu machines I was planning to take a look at landscape this weekend. Does anyone have any thoughts?

It would be for 2 servers, 2 laptops and a desktop.

Just use ansible scripts
https://www.ansible.com

I just use docker, k8s(minikube for local dev) and helm, it makes it easy to match the production(or test/staging/demo/whatever) environments for any number of projects and new people who join can get things up and running very quickly.

You can use chef or puppet for configuration management

@ChappIO
Landscape is not free thou :(

Packer + Salt works fine. Tried Ansible, not for me.

@stuqshwk and you use that for infrequently connected machines like laptops?

@ChappIO well, laptop yes, infrequent no. Mostly for servers, though.

I don't really use multiple systems, at least not similar enough for this particular use case, but for my home desktop and home server machines, I've got tweaked copies of a collection of scripts that handle my initial system setup. Had to reinstall my dev machine recently and I had everything installed and running again in under an hour.

I used the following repo as a base for my custom scripts: https://github.com/snwh/...

@Linux But so far it is the only platform that I found that can manage infrequently connected systems.

The problem I am running into with other platforms is that either they are built to only manage servers. Or they need a constant connection.

@ChappIO
Maybee Spacewalk CAB achieve that too..?