
Ask HN: How do you automate your server provisioning? - ryanmccullagh
My goal is to fully automate spinning up servers&#x2F;environments, with, for example, a MySQL installation with users&#x2F;data. I would like to automate this provisioning via a script or some sort.<p>I know docker can do this, but I need to be able to run this on bare metal. Is saltstack the way to go, or Chef, or Puppet?<p>I would prefer not to run a daemon on the target machine.
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mtmail
You already mention several [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-
source_conf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-
source_configuration_management_software)

Have a look at ansible, it works agentless (no daemon on target machine).

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karmakaze
I've used ansible for bootstrapping new nodes and Chef recipes to converge the
node to desired state. This pattern worked well enough for both bare metal and
EC2 instances. We just ran separate Chef servers in each.

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z3t4
I use a Node.JS script. JavaScrip/Node is really good at dealing with text IO,
and async operations. I for example use the SSH module to SSH into a server to
run apt and edit configuration files.

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ryanmccullagh
I started writing some scripts that will execute scp to copy over some shell
scripts and then a script to ssh into it and execute one command. These
commands run apt

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smt88
RDS + Elastic Beanstalk, because I am extremely lazy and like GUIs

