Weekly Journal 113 - Ansible for Dotfiles

Ansible for Dotfiles

Had a big “oh duh” moment this week. Instead of using a dotfile management tool that is really complicated or one that creates symlinks all over my home directory, why not use a tool that I already know? Ansible is a tool that I already know how to use, and it is built for managing files and templates and copying them to where they need to go. Seems obvious once you think about for a minute. I just feel dumb that I didn’t think of it sooner.

My tentative plan is to run Ansible in a container. Ansible can then use Jinja templates to manage my dotfiles and copy them to the proper location when I spin up a new Linux or Windows system. While I’m confident this will work fine for Linux and WSL, I need to run some tests to see if I can use Ansible to manage some of my configuration files in Windows.