#Ansible

In this blog post, I share a straightforward way to manage your MacOS workstation using Ansible, based on Jeff Geerling's collection of Ansible roles and collections. After installing the necessary dependencies, such as the Ansible Galaxy mac collection and dotfiles role, you can define the dotfiles you want to symlink, and where to get them, and confogure which packages to install via homebrew. This approach allows you to set up your workstation as code, achieving about 80% of the setup process, with the remaining requiring some manual configuration.

Ruby on Rails is quickly becoming my framework of choice for my personal websites and projects. It's a pleasure to work with and has been easy to learn. But no framework is without its challenges. One of those challenges is of course deploying the app to a server. There are a lot of options for hosting and deploying a Rails app. But, I like to run my own servers which means I have to also take care of deploying to those servers. I'd prefer to be deploying images to AWS ECS but I don't need that kind of infrastructure for my personal website. It's just a blog it can suffer seconds of downtime when I deploy updates. So my approach these days is to use Ansible to handle the deploy steps.

Create a systemd service to run your rails app server.