I use something similar to configure my entire desktop from a default Debian install using idempotent shell scripts. The repo isn't public since it contains a lot of sensitive information but I'm currently developing something based on that for a server I'm working on: https://github.com/T0astBread/easymark-server-config
Cool, yeah when you do it enough times you just want to script it. I use to have more sensitive stuff in here I think before I obliterated the historical stuff and made it a public repo, but I factored all that before sharing it. Like 2 years ago. It was a good exercise I think, separating secrets from config.
Definitely! What I'm forcing onto Bash is basically what Ansible does normally. For the desktop use case I've certainly noticed that it might be easier to use something that is already idempotent by default (like Ansible). The server thing isn't all that complex though, at least not the parts that you could replace with Ansible.
