[OddMerlin]

Why not use Ansible for something like this?

Don’t get me wrong, I love bash scripts like any other old hat, but Ansible scratches this exact itch.

You’ve got playbooks that can execute shell, provide logging, better management, history of execution, fleet management, and it’s light weight. And there’s a robust community of shared modules, etc.

[hashar]

Why add the complexity of having to maintain an Ansible installation, a logging stack, deal with their upgrades and whatever python issue one might encounter. I had the issue of Ansible builtin `shell` not doing the right thing (sh vs bash) or it being unnecessarily slow when uselessly looking up `cowsay`.

Adding layers and layers of tooling is often overkill and it is hard to bit the simplicity of 33 lines of shell when the use case is a single person doing the code, deployment and maintenance.

[OddMerlin]

I’m with you on the usecase. Simple server deployment on a VM, bash script is fine, in fact I recommend it. It’s when you start dealing with 5+ VMs that I would start looking into using a tool like Ansible.

[elevation]

Bash is better than ansible for configuring the core infrastructure underneath ansible.

In a devops workflow you "treat servers like cattle instead of pets" but your org still needs a few pets. Some host you control must either host DNS or manage your DNS provider's API key. Same for CA, IdP, git, backup and monitoring services, and the ansible machine itself. You'll have to manually configure these things before your "cattle" tools can run.

Once you're up and running, it's possible to make ansible manage it own dependencies, but this introduces circular dependencies complicates bootstrapping (consider a disaster recovery situation) and amplifies both the impact of faults and the difficulty of troubleshooting them. Do you want to be debugging python dependencies in the middle of the night so you can finally get ansible to execute the couple bash commands that will bring your ACME CA back up? I'd rather run bash directly.

At a small scale with a stable set of requirements, your core infrastructure is better served by a good operations manual and a simple deployment toolset with minimal dependencies. Plain bash fits the bill!

[prmoustache]

I think even ansible is overkill for such a simple thing. Ansible use case works better when you need to do stuff on multiple hosts.

For years I've started using and abandoned ansible and puppet recipes for setting up my own computers and everytime the conclusion was that I would spend more time installing git, ansible and puppet in the first place and debugging my recipes than using them. Now all my setup lives in shell functions in my .bashrc.d. I still need git but I don't need ansible or puppet anymore.

[bravetraveler]

Ansible is great even for simple single-host 'shell scripts'.

Lean into the module ecosystem. Want to ensure a config file is a certain way? Jinja/template it, or use lineinfile instead of echo/shell redirects.

That's a lot of mumbo-jumbo. The point is, there's a lot of stuff scripts want to do. Ansible provides these as modules. Using the modules spares you from writing code to do something in a robust/repeatable way.

The 'line in a file' example is a good case, IMO. A shell script with redirection either requires specific code to look first, or simply endlessly append. With Ansible you don't have to do all of that.

Your script needs to do something when something changed? Ansible has you covered: handlers!

Python is right within reach too. I find it a way to write Python via YML, basically.

[TheCapeGreek]

I think Ansible is a little overkill for some projects tbh. Ideally I'd love a middle ground between bash scripts and Ansible, similar to Caddy's config simplicity over nginx.

>it’s light weight

Eh, don't think that's the case for everyone.

I dabbled with Ansible at a previous job, and set up a very basic personal server setup for Nextcloud and one other app. It was much slower than if I had just written some bash scripts. Idempotency was nice, but the feedback loop wasn't great.