I always want to play around with Ansible but then I open up the docs and I don't know where to start and give up. How do you folks develop for it? Throwaway VPS? VM?

@gargron I just use ansible on my dev laptop.... :p
It's not much more than a scripted SSH client, it doesn't require much. Once projects get important I usually set up a small VPS that will just centralize ansible and work with less lag, it's useful with teams. They made that into a commercial service too with Ansible Tower I think.

@CobaltVelvet by the way - is there something better than ansible? here is my dream scenario:

1. specify hosts
2. specify roles of hosts (can overlap): postgres, redis, load balancer, web worker, background worker, streaming worker.
3. specify domain, admin e-mail
4. the script sets up all hosts, i.e. whitelists the right IPs in each machine's firewall and postgres pg_hba.conf, sets up the db, fetches let's encrypt cert, creates the nginx config, etc.

@gargron that does look a lot like what ansible is made for. It's basically what would https://github.com/0xa/mastodon-ansible do if I was still maintaining it

@CobaltVelvet oh, you made another one too. gosh darn. there's tootsuite/mastodon-ansible

i wish instead of having like 4 different ones, just one would be finished ; w ;

@gargron hey I checked, I did it first :p