Ansible

The Transition from Ansible to GNU Stow

In a previous post, I described my approach to managing my system by treating configuration as code.

Initially, I used Ansible for everything provisioning, application installation, and dotfile management. While that worked, it eventually became clear that Ansible was the wrong tool for managing frequently changing configuration files.

Ansible is excellent for provisioning: installing the OS, packages, system dependencies, and enforcing machine state. But dotfiles are different. They are iterative, experimental, and change often. Updating a complex playbook just to tweak a .zshrc alias introduced unnecessary friction.

This project started after reading an article on the aws blog about serving redirect urls from an S3 bucket. The author even provided a CloudFormation template pretty sweet 😄.

Since I wanted to learn how to use CDK I decided to use this template and convert it to to a CDK project to do the same with some minor adjustments to suite my needs.

You are welcome to go to the project repository and have a gander.

The project started when while watching a keynote and the presenter mentioned that he had his entire home folder under version control. I have to admit the idea intrigued me so much that I decided to put my own home folder under version control, and like the speaker make it public. After all, sharing is caring…

After a while, I found it very difficult to keep my dotfiles project update with all the things that were happening in my home folder on multiple machines, so I started looking around. After reading this post by Leonid Mamchenkov I decided to give Ansible a try.

Since the last update here a lot of things have changed in my life. So I’ve deceided to convert this site to a static site and remove a lot of the old posts, since most of them where reposts.

So this is the new site. Let me know what you think in the comments bellow.

More to come…

With our life’s constantly becoming more and more depended on electronic devices we have to device ways to keep everything in sync. Nowadays we have smartphone’s, tablets, laptops, netbooks, media centers and all of this devices keep copies of out data. Our word documents, pictures, expense estimations etc.

Up until very recently, and some of us still do, we move around with usb sticks portable usb hard drives and basically a copy of our digital life. About a little more than two years ago I found Dropbox a way to keep a folder on your computer in sync with other computers and various other electronic devices. Dropbox provides a free 2GB storage and 3 upgrade options of 100GB, 200GB and 500GB.

Last night I was looking for a way to redirect a domain (example.com) to example.com/folder but without actually redirecting the user to that folder.

So I thought that the best way to go about is actually treading every request as example.com/folder.

Anyway enough said here is the result.

# Redirect to a different folder
# of the current domain that was requested
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /folder/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Place the above in a .htaccess file in the root of your webserver.

This is my first post, how exciting!