Based on my experience with Chef - probably not, unless you’re really familiar with it or are using some kind of framework. Nothing against Chef, but it has more setup overhead.
I picked Ansible for this because it scales down well to very simple use cases. There isn’t a whole lot of setup overhead. It helps that it’s just pushing scripts over SSH, rather than using a central configuration server.
I found it tremendously valuable to have my development environment config reproducible, because my laptop hard drive went bad and I needed to get up to speed again on short notice. (I also had backups, of course.)
I wonder if it’s worth it for only one laptop.
Based on my experience with Chef - probably not, unless you’re really familiar with it or are using some kind of framework. Nothing against Chef, but it has more setup overhead.
I picked Ansible for this because it scales down well to very simple use cases. There isn’t a whole lot of setup overhead. It helps that it’s just pushing scripts over SSH, rather than using a central configuration server.
I found it tremendously valuable to have my development environment config reproducible, because my laptop hard drive went bad and I needed to get up to speed again on short notice. (I also had backups, of course.)