Like soup-to-nuts. I know I need to document what I’m doing and I’ve started several times, but then I never go back and make updates. I don’t know if it’s just the ADHD or if I’m just going about it or thinking about it in the wrong way.

So I’m curious about:

  • what you use for your documentation
  • how you organize it
  • what information you include
  • how you work documentation into your changes/tinkering flow

Edit: Dang, folks! You all have given me a lot to read through, think about, and explore. Thank you!

  • IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    But as a result you’ll have a self-documented configuration-as-a-code that will allow you to scale your setup as you need. Reproducing something won’t require reading your notes, remembering your actions etc.

    Until you realise that

    • you don’t really need to scale a homelab that much
    • if something breaks, you just want to quickly fix it manually because “doing the Ansible” is more of a pain
    • now idempotency and documentation-as-code is out of the window. ;)

    (I’m being tongue-in-cheek here. I don’t doubt this may work for you, but it takes much more discipline than I have.)

    • bizdelnick@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      9 hours ago

      you don’t really need to scale a homelab that much

      Maybe. But you never know this beforehand.

      if something breaks, you just want to quickly fix it manually because “doing the Ansible” is more of a pain

      In most cases you just need to replay a playbook for quick fix. But I agree that the proper fix will likely take a longer time (while downtime is much shorter).

      now idempotency and documentation-as-code is out of the window.

      Let @BruisedMoose@piefed.social decide.

      P. S. I don’t like Ansible, other tools can be easier to use. But I don’t want to recommend something concrete.

      • IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        I don’t like Ansible, other tools can be easier to use. But I don’t want to recommend something concrete.

        Which ones do you like to work with? (Even though it’s not a recommendation ;) I’ve only dabbled in Ansible so far and found it overkill for most of the things I do, but maybe one of yours isn’t?

    • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      Yeah as someone who does both ansible is for repeatable multi-system commands like telling everything to update or configuring a local agent on every machine at once.