Orgmode for managing OS configuration

Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[Giacomo M]

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Dear all,
I would like to clean up my Linux setup to be easily replicable. I am
considering keeping everything in one org file, and then tangling files
(e.g. exec scripts, systemd service unit files) and executing bash snippets
(e.g. for installing packages and sed'ing config files). Then one would
need just emacs and git (or rsync) to start with.

Does anybody have experience with this? Is the experience positive or
negative?

Also, should I just run emacs as root? Or using somehow sudo non
interactively for babel blocks execution?

Thanks,

Giacomo M

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Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[Stefan Huchler]

Giacomo M <jackjackk@gmail.com> writes:

> Dear all,
> I would like to clean up my Linux setup to be easily replicable. I am
> considering keeping everything in one org file, and then tangling
> files (e.g. exec scripts, systemd service unit files) and executing
> bash snippets (e.g. for installing packages and sed'ing config files).
> Then one would need just emacs and git (or rsync) to start with.
>
> Does anybody have experience with this? Is the experience positive or
> negative?
>
> Also, should I just run emacs as root? Or using somehow sudo non
> interactively for babel blocks execution? 
>
> Thanks,
>
> Giacomo M

Do you know about nixos and guixsd? Sounds like you want to implement
here something similar, except less good cause this distributions have
also atomic updates and features like testing a configuration and
rollback features and some sort of conflict management, also it can
switch "profiles" without reboots and stuff like that.

Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[Giacomo M]

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Dear Stefan,

thanks for the hints, I wasn't aware of these projects. While they sound
appealing, I would like to stick to my current distribution (archlinux),
for a variety of reasons (e.g. Im updating my raspberry which seems more
supported by arch than nixos, I'm more familiar with it, I like the vanilla
approach and wiki). Anyway, I'll look more into these options.

Still, having one or few org files documenting AND implementing my setup,
apart from being easy potential blog posts, I think would help me keeping
things under control (especially over years-long time horizons). It is
working well for my emacs conf  (before my .emacs was a mess), but not sure
if it's the same scaling up to OS (e.g. chmod when tangling, root user
privileges when executing, or other things I'm not aware of).

Il 03 Nov 2016 2:55 PM, "Stefan Huchler" <stefan.huchler@mail.de> ha
scritto:

> Giacomo M <jackjackk@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Dear all,
> > I would like to clean up my Linux setup to be easily replicable. I am
> > considering keeping everything in one org file, and then tangling
> > files (e.g. exec scripts, systemd service unit files) and executing
> > bash snippets (e.g. for installing packages and sed'ing config files).
> > Then one would need just emacs and git (or rsync) to start with.
> >
> > Does anybody have experience with this? Is the experience positive or
> > negative?
> >
> > Also, should I just run emacs as root? Or using somehow sudo non
> > interactively for babel blocks execution?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Giacomo M
>
> Do you know about nixos and guixsd? Sounds like you want to implement
> here something similar, except less good cause this distributions have
> also atomic updates and features like testing a configuration and
> rollback features and some sort of conflict management, also it can
> switch "profiles" without reboots and stuff like that.
>
>
>

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Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel]

you can have a look at here

https://propellor.branchable.com/

It should be possible to use emacs to edit the config.hs file.

Now you need to extend it for arch .

Cheers

Frederic

Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[William Denton]

On 3 November 2016, Giacomo M wrote:

> I would like to clean up my Linux setup to be easily replicable. I am
> considering keeping everything in one org file, and then tangling files
> (e.g. exec scripts, systemd service unit files) and executing bash snippets
> (e.g. for installing packages and sed'ing config files). Then one would
> need just emacs and git (or rsync) to start with.

I'm doing this in a small way with Conforguration:

https://github.com/wdenton/conforguration

It's just personal files right now, nothing in /etc/ or up there, but it might 
be useful.  I'll be configuring a new (Ubuntu) machine or two soon so I'll be 
adding to it with packages and some system configuration information.

Bill
-- 
William Denton :: Toronto, Canada :: https://www.miskatonic.org/
Caveat lector.

Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[Grant Rettke]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 6:44 AM, Giacomo M <jackjackk@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anybody have experience with this?


Yes. Here is my top level provisioning document at the correct headline:

https://github.com/grettke/osx-provision/blob/master/El-Capitan/provisioning.md#provisioning

And here are all of the tangled files:

https://github.com/grettke/osx-provision/tree/master/El-Capitan

The scripts are all in Bash for the computer and Org-Mode for the
human (there are manual steps required).

This is for OS X and the concepts all apply to Linux.
>
> Is the experience positive or negative?


Positive. It makes it easy to break up your provisioning into separate
scripts. My scripts are supposed to be idempotent so it is easy to
play around and try new stuff. The Org document makes it easy to make
sense of everything.

Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[John Hendy]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 9:22 AM, Giacomo M <jackjackk@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Stefan,
>
> thanks for the hints, I wasn't aware of these projects. While they sound
> appealing, I would like to stick to my current distribution (archlinux), for
> a variety of reasons (e.g. Im updating my raspberry which seems more
> supported by arch than nixos, I'm more familiar with it, I like the vanilla
> approach and wiki). Anyway, I'll look more into these options.

Made me chuckle. I'm on Arch and have been for years after trying a
bunch of others. It's hard to explain but you just find a distro that
works and you like it... and it's hard to imagine going elsewhere! We
had the same thought when accomplishing this through another distro
was suggested (even if those other distros are amazing).

I'd love to hear where you get with this, and the idea is quite
intriguing. It's pretty rare I wipe and re-install, but I do like to
keep configuration files backed up so I don't have to re-figure-out
everything between my last install and the next. I have a cron job
that grabs config files of interest and stores them in one folder;
periodically I push to git. That's as far as I got and generally on a
new system I just pull them in one by one as I remember that I need
them.

Packages can cause this issue... after a year or two on a system,
there's packages that say they were explicitly installed, but I don't
recall why. Some way to track the evolution of a system along with
notes/links of where you found some fix or solution would be really
cool (and well suited to Org!).

I'd like to see/hear about what you end up with!


John

>
> Still, having one or few org files documenting AND implementing my setup,
> apart from being easy potential blog posts, I think would help me keeping
> things under control (especially over years-long time horizons). It is
> working well for my emacs conf  (before my .emacs was a mess), but not sure
> if it's the same scaling up to OS (e.g. chmod when tangling, root user
> privileges when executing, or other things I'm not aware of).
>
>
> Il 03 Nov 2016 2:55 PM, "Stefan Huchler" <stefan.huchler@mail.de> ha
> scritto:
>>
>> Giacomo M <jackjackk@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > Dear all,
>> > I would like to clean up my Linux setup to be easily replicable. I am
>> > considering keeping everything in one org file, and then tangling
>> > files (e.g. exec scripts, systemd service unit files) and executing
>> > bash snippets (e.g. for installing packages and sed'ing config files).
>> > Then one would need just emacs and git (or rsync) to start with.
>> >
>> > Does anybody have experience with this? Is the experience positive or
>> > negative?
>> >
>> > Also, should I just run emacs as root? Or using somehow sudo non
>> > interactively for babel blocks execution?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > Giacomo M
>>
>> Do you know about nixos and guixsd? Sounds like you want to implement
>> here something similar, except less good cause this distributions have
>> also atomic updates and features like testing a configuration and
>> rollback features and some sort of conflict management, also it can
>> switch "profiles" without reboots and stuff like that.
>>
>>
>

Re: Orgmode for managing OS configuration

[Karl Voit]

* Giacomo M <jackjackk@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> I would like to clean up my Linux setup to be easily replicable. I am
> considering keeping everything in one org file, and then tangling files
> (e.g. exec scripts, systemd service unit files) and executing bash snippets
> (e.g. for installing packages and sed'ing config files). Then one would
> need just emacs and git (or rsync) to start with.
>
> Does anybody have experience with this? Is the experience positive or
> negative?

I posted my approach on this list in May:

> From: Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at>
> Subject: Re: Using source blocks instead of Ansible
> Message-ID: <2016-05-05T22-49-08@devnull.Karl-Voit.at>
> Date: Thu, 5 May 2016 23:02:28 +0200

(Since the web interface of gmane is down for the moment, I can't
give you a link.)


I am not using tangling. I limit myself to just install packages and
modify settings via search/replace instead.

HTH

-- 
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       > get Memacs from https://github.com/novoid/Memacs <

https://github.com/novoid/extract_pdf_annotations_to_orgmode + more on github