Centrally manage configuration files

Stow It!

Ansible Playbook

To deploy this role on a system, you can use the playbook:

---
- hosts: localhost
  roles:
    - { role: dotfiles }
  become: true

This playbook is written with the assumption that it will be deployed on the system on which you will be using the Ansible role. As with the role itself, you can adapt the playbook, for example,

ansible-playbook dotfiles-play.yml

to suit your own requirements before calling it up.

Conclusions

The advantage of storing configuration files centrally is that they are always available, even on new systems. The combination of Ansible and Stow offers an easy approach to managing configuration files, and you can install software packages and plugins for your applications, as well. If you want to find out more about Ansible roles, the Ansible documentation [3] is a good place to start.

Infos

XDG base directory specification: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/
Stow: https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
Ansible role documentation:https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbook_guide/playbooks_reuse_roles.html

The Author

Thorsten Scherf is the global Product Lead for Identity Management and Platform Security in Red Hat's Product Operations group. He is a regular speaker at various international conferences and writes a lot about open source software.

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