Use some provisioning/automation software

[ForNeVeR]

Currently, most of our tasks are manual and error-prone. We should at least use some simple automation software. I think about Ansible, since it imposes no requirements for the host (I believe) and should work across all the platforms we use.

@Minoru, have you had a chance to try it somewhere?

[Minoru]

Not in production. Still going through toy examples, running it against a local VM.

The best resources for learning so far are this page as a guide and the official docs as a reference.

[ForNeVeR]

Ansible doesn't support Windows as control node, so it won't work.

I've aslo checked out Puppet and Salt, but they seem to enterprisey: both asked me to fill some crazy forms before I could download their clients.

Chef seems like the only remaining option, will investigate further.

[ForNeVeR]

Chef would work, it looks cross-platform enough. But, all out of a sudden, I don't like idea of managing a separate Ruby (or, for what matters, Python) environment specially for the purpose of module deployment.

My use case may be a bit unusual: I'll need this environment, probably, once or twice a year: a significant amount of time between invocations. It's likely that I'll significantly change my machines or environment between these periods, so pracically every time I'll run the client I'll need to tune my environment again (and for me managing renv/venv is rather unpleasant experience).

Also, the agent-less deployment for Chef requires some additional magic which couldn't be good.

[ForNeVeR]

So, I've decided I'll invent a bycicle, because why the hell not.

We'll have a good cross-platform deployment system that manages precisely the tasks we need in Codingteam and which is operable and environment-friendly for my machines and my use cases (since I'm currently the only operator for the stuff, it is important).

Stay tuned, ETA ~6 months.