How I turned away from Ansible, and then eventually came back around to it.

Giving Ansible another try

A while ago, probably a year (okay so not that long ago), I began taking CaC and IaC more seriously in my home lab. It has grown from 1 server to 3 servers now, plus 2 VPSes, and some servers I manage for friends. It was time for me to bring everything up to a standard, and that standard was to be defined with a tool such as Ansible. I’ll admit when I first started working with it I was unhappy with the way it functioned. It felt limited and I still wasn’t in the mindset of defining a configuration to achieve. I was still operating under a task-based configuration rather than state-based.

I have come full circle. My very first site on this domain (if I remember correctly) was based on Hugo. Now after years of playing around and experimenting with different languages, builders, generators, etc… I have settled back onto Hugo once again. This time I am determined to better understand how it functions, and also I wanted to learn Go and this seems like a natural SSG to use. I have always preferred static site generators and I am so happy to be back.