Ansible for Everything: Automating My Entire Infrastructure

After manually configuring servers for the hundredth time, I finally automated everything with Ansible. Now I can rebuild my entire homelab in minutes.

The Playbook Structure

My Ansible repository is organized like this:

ansible/
├── inventories/
│   ├── production/
│   └── staging/
├── roles/
│   ├── common/
│   ├── docker/
│   ├── kubernetes/
│   └── monitoring/
└── playbooks/
    ├── site.yml
    ├── provision.yml
    └── deploy.yml

Common Role

Every server gets the common role, which handles:

• System updates
• Security hardening (SSH, firewall)
• Standard tooling (vim, git, htop)
• User management

Docker Role

The Docker role installs Docker Engine and configures:

• Docker daemon with appropriate logging
• Docker Compose
• Automatic container updates with Watchtower

Automated Deployments

I use Ansible to deploy all my self-hosted services. Here's a snippet for deploying Nextcloud:

- name: Deploy Nextcloud
  docker_container:
    name: nextcloud
    image: nextcloud:latest
    volumes:
      - /mnt/storage/nextcloud:/var/www/html
    env:
      POSTGRES_HOST: postgres.homelab.local
      REDIS_HOST: redis.homelab.local

Secrets Management

I use Ansible Vault to encrypt sensitive variables. All passwords, API keys, and certificates are stored encrypted in Git.

The Result

Now when I need to add a new service or rebuild a server, it's just:

ansible-playbook -i inventories/production site.yml --limit newserver

No more manual configuration. No more drift between servers. Just pure automation bliss.