I spent a while getting Ansible to be able to setup and maintain my server(s). And ended up not using it as much as I should, mostly because the computer I used to run Ansible from became a “Steam Machine” so I’m rarely sitting on it with a keyboard now and I don’t want to have personal info and keys on my work computer.

But it was a good learning, and useful while I used it. Now I just use ssh and compose files directly.

My target is terraform to provide VMs on my miniPC and ansible to configure them. For my nas, probably a basic distro then some ansible stuff to setup stomate.

Usually I put handcuffs on her every night, to keep her off of me, and only feed her the highest grade sushi and meat. It keeps her hair shiny, keeps good health, and complaints down to a minimum. I make sure she gets adequate sleep on an expensive mattress while I sleep on a 2 inch futon on the floor.

Oh wait… wrong kind of server.

I ssh into it twice a year to perform updates but otherwise i leave it alone. Server’s been chugging along for like a decade now.

I’ll take the maverick and share my niche position. I did most if not all my proxmox setup and configuration via complete reliance on LLMs. Now, before anyone says “why would you do that”, and I’ll be straight up. I was high for all of it, and not a small blaze I’m talking regularly stoned for months. And I’ll say it “got me by” for the frame work. It worked? Sorta. Music, Plex, immich, docker, arr stack, podman. Now, I can’t say I fully understand it still and I’ve done a lot of changes since that point last year and I figured it out by asking the model to backtrack what we did and I wont lie it helped me better learn how to question the models for my job, and It did decent documnetation over my server. But again, I was literally high doing it

self hosted gitlab. each server has a repo with all the docker configs and application configs. also have any scripts for the server itself on there as well, things like required libs, network configs, etc.

I also have a repo dedicated for let’s encrypt SSL that retrieves new certs every month. then on each server is an install script scheduled that pulls the certs down, installs them, and restarts any services automatically.

should anything go wrong, I have a siem monitor that will alert me that a service failed to start etc.

currently running four servers like this with varying degrees of complexity.

“code local and push remote” is only more efficient if you have a faulty connection with ssh or want to use a GUI editor that doesn’t support remote connections. What you’re doing is good. You can scoure for more “modern” ways that might have more glimmer and sparkly lights, but it won’t improve efficiency.

I wait for something to break. Then I yell “God fucking dammit, I don’t have time for this right now!” and spend an hour triaging things before I just try docker down, pull, up and everything works.

Ansible is one way to “code local, push to remote(s)”. Can define so-called playbooks, which is basically just a script, to do reoccuring tasks like e.g. updates.

Depends what you’re trying to do, really

If you’re talking about going in and restarting containers and checking logs, there are tools like Portainer that give a nice UI you can quickly use from your phone

If you’re talking about repetitive tasks, sometimes there’s a tool to automate it already (e.g. updates via watchtower, unattended-upgrades), and if not, you can write a script and possibly run it via a cronjob if that makes sense

If you’re talking about doing new stuff, you either stick with the SSH & shell commands, or you look into IaC tools like ansible as another reply mentioned. Another option is something like Nix where the setup is defined in config, so you make your changes there

nixos, mostly. It has a very steep learning curve but if it breaks I’m just “whatever, rollback now, fix properly later”.

If you’re connecting from a system that’s a long distance away from your server in terms of latency, mosh can be more comfortable to use than ssh.

There are probably multiple flashy clients and gui’s for it, but if you’re already used to the terminal, I’d recommend rsync. This might be the wrong syntax but something like rsync -av ~/local/project servername:/var/www/html/ would take your local files and update the web directory of your server with only the files that are more recent. Rsync will even read your ssh config file so if you’re got an entry for your server you can just use the host name.

I ran a little blog for a while using a static site generator so I setup the git server on my web server and wrote a git hook where every time I pushed to the repo the server would pull it’s cloned copy of the repo into the html directory. Took me a few hours to setup but it made updating the blog as simple as pushing to the repo.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

Ansible and terraform can bath do with you want though for a single server I’d consider them both to be a somewhat overkill. But then again homelabbing often is about overkill.