Ansible is a relatively new kid in the town of Configuration Management. If you don’t know it already go see this introductory video: System Provisioning with Ansible.

Having a Puppet background, I got impressed by how state is defined in Ansible with simple YAML files without necessarily sacrificing powerfulness. I actually find very pleasant both reading and writing playbooks (and that is not to mention the cow). Using the current ssh infrastructure is a bonus point, you can instantly get going.

I need to install ruby+rbenv in some Debian servers so I wrote a playbook for it. It’s basically a translation of this script.

Playbook for installing ruby/rbenv

Building ruby takes its time, be patient.