base-dev-setup

An effort to make it easy for any developer to backup, restore, install, update tools you use daily in pretty much any machine (might require some monkey patching though) you ever use and primarily easy to customize and fit your needs.

I picked up Ansible to allow me easily:

• 🚀 executing a playbook;
• ☕ getting a cup of coffee; and
• 💻 have my computer ready to kick in some great work

So far, it was just tested in Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 19.10.

Getting started

If you don't have ansible and awscli installed you can run bin/bootstrap.

#1. Backup your data

This playbook saves specified files to an S3 bucket of your choice.

First, you should back up the files that you want to reuse, so create vars/backup.yml from example and adjust it to your needs.

Finally, execute:

bin/save-backup

Done

#2. Restoring your data

For restoring, besides downloading the files you've set in the previous step, it also:

• Installs packages and binaries you use frequently; and
• Clones GitHub repositories you're currently working on.

Again, before kicking off, create and adjust the following vars:

• vars/packages.yml from example
• vars/repositories.yml from example

Note that:

• For packages you can easily remove or filter tools you might not want at all
• For repositories I suggest keeping separate folders for your personal and company repositories.
• Still, for repositories I added both folders to your Nautilus bookmarks for quick access

If you're in a new machine, you'll need at least ansible and awscli. Feel free to run bin/bootstrap first.

Now just running:

bin/restore-backup

will do the job.

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What it does installs

A quick look here would show you what's being installed, but I can summarize as:

• General base tools and requirements (e.g. curl, virtualenv, jq, etc)
• Some python linters/tools
• Some MUST dev tools (e.g. git, docker, vscodium, etc)
• Some database tools (e.g. mysqlcli, dbeaver)
• Some daily tools (e.g. slack, zoom, spotify, etc)
• Some devops tools (e.g. terraform, kubectl, etc)
• Some productivity tools (e.g. wtfutil, moo.do, tusk)

Customizing it

This playbook was designed to behave like an easy plug-and-play tool.

Do you want to remove something from there? Let's say you're not interested in installing tilda, it would be as easy as deleting two lines:

- import_tasks: tools/tilda.yml
  tags: tilda, binaries, tools

The same applies if you want to add something new: Create a small set of tasks and import it.

- import_tasks: mycustom_tools/my_great_tool.yml
  tags: custom, tools

Updating tools

You can easily update any tool, without having to:

• 😴 Search in google the download page
• 😴 Head out to the download page
• 😴 Download it
• 😴 Change chmod or execute it

Instead of doing any manual, tedious and repetitive work, use this restore playbook.

Let's say you want to update all dev tools:

ansible-playbook playbooks/restore.yml --tags dev

Or maybe you're willing to update only zoom to the latest version. You could simply:

ansible-playbook playbooks/restore.yml --tags zoom

Whether you want to update all dev tools except git and docker?

ansible-playbook playbooks/restore.yml --tags dev --skip-tags git,docker

Example

No manual steps at all?

Well, I still have to set up some stuff manually.

Right now, personally, after restoring a new machine I gotta:

• Personalize my dock and favorites
• Enable night light
• Set up my multi-monitor settings
• Set up my keybindings
• Disable gnome emoji-picker
• Trigger my VSCodium settings sync
• Review permissions of some restored files

Always we should strive for automating everything to get working even faster. Pull Requests are welcome!