The "PLAN"

Contents of the README.md describe the "PLAN" for config-system and the software is not yet in a working state.

Clones! I need Clones!

I re-installed one of my Ubuntu VMs for , I don't know, at least the 4th time and it dawned on me that I'm not following one of my rules. Every time I setup this server, I customize it the same way. Why am I repeating the same work? The rule is "Never repeat yourself more than twice," and I broke my own rule. I blame the long interval between VM rebuilds... That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

config-system lets you save a system state and re-create it on a different machine. There's two main parts, a set of scripts to get a system's configuration, and a set of scripts to set a system's configuration. "System configuration" can be anything, there just needs to be a get/set script for that configuration. Here's a concrete example of settings can be copy over:

OS Settings:

• Identify OS and produce a differential between the unmodified OS and the current system. For example, if run on Ubuntu Server 20.04,

• APT repositories and their GPG keys

• Installed packages

• SSH server keys

• /etc files for base OS packages

Global Application Settings:

• /etc files for user installed packages (generic)
• "alternative" application settings
• nginx webserver settings & wwwroot contents
• php8 settings
• mariadb settings & databases (exported)

User Application Settings

• Visual Studio Code settings
• Conky customizations
• Wallpaper
• Gnome extensions & settings

As the admin, you can disable any get scripts as well as write your own.

How It Works

get-config runs get-* scripts in the get-scripts folder. Scripts is a misnomer; any executable programs in the folder that begins with get-* will be executed in alphanumeric order.

Data files, that is your configuration collected by the get-* scripts, is saved in the sys-config-<timestamp> folder. Once you capture the configuration you want, rename the sys-config-<timestamp> to sys-config, and run the package-config script.

Copy the resulting install-config.run to the target system. Run the file to unpack into a new folder and run set-config to apply your settings.

There are a few intelligent design failsafes:

• Source and target system must be the same OS, version, and variant.
• backup folder contains an undo script to reverse all changes.