Ansible lets you configure a server once, write it down, and never do it by hand again. In this tutorial we’ll build your first playbook from scratch – then run it with ansible-pull, which I think is the better way to use Ansible for most setups.

We’ll create a git repository to hold the playbook, write it step by step, break the settings out into a variables file, then SSH into a Linode server, install Ansible, and let the machine pull its own configuration and apply it. No control node, no inventory file to babysit.

By the end you’ll have a working, version-controlled setup that any new server can configure itself from in one command.

Note: You’ll find the code I used in this video here.