I like to spin up and murder a few DigitalOcean droplets every now and then but the amount of effort that goes into setting them up was kind of a buzzkill. I could also have just used images but I decided to just have some fun and make an Ansible script to do it for me.
This script does a few things on a remote host, namely:
- Install Python, this is required for Ansible to function
- Download packages like pip, docker and certbot
- Create two users that I often use with credentials and proper groups
After this I can directly ssh into one of my machines without using the root account which is quite convenient.
The most important requisite is ansible-playbook, since this will be used to kick off the yaml scripts.
Since this script is for my personal use it might be a bit hard to set up for other people. If you however want to try it out for yourself you'd have to do a few things:
- Clone the repository
- Add a .vault-password file in ../ with the vault password OR change user passwords and keys to your own in
group_vars/all.yml - Run
make runto start deploying to a remote host
And that's it! If everything goes well you'll be able to ssh into your own server and get the party started.
As I learn more about server security and DevOps each day I'll probably update this script to reflect my new knowledge and to further improve my droplet setup script.