Ansible

The Ansible playbooks for this article can be found here

I have a laptop that I use for experimenting with different operating systems. I’ve used it to run various Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I tend to set it up by hand, use it for a while, then reinstall with something new. In the most recent iteration of this I’ve used Alpine Linux to see if it would be suitable distribution for more than a container runtime. Many people may be familiar with Alpine from using Docker, where Alpine gives you one of the smallest footprint containers to start from. Some of its more compelling features are that it uses OpenRC as its init system, musl libc instead of glibc, and busybox for a pile of standard tools that normally require other binaries.

I have started using Ansible to manage the few services that I still have running around here. I want to deploy clortho to a user on the system I use for serving up movies to my Roku players . I need to copy the source, setup a venv with the dependencies (aiohttp ), and setup a systemd unit to make sure it is started at boot time.

As of Python 3.3 the core library includes support for venv , and Python 3.4 added default installation of pip so that now the only support you need on a target system is the core Python 3.4 build. Everything else can be done inside a venv.