Desktops are cattle, not pets.

“Failed to install: OS version not compatible…”

If you’re like me, you live in morbid fear of messing up your development environment. Having to uninstall tools, reinstall them again, or worse, having to redo your entire OS because you’ve arrived at an unrecoverable state is the bane of an IT worker’s existence.

But what if you can simply throw away your broken configuration and start fresh with a few simple steps? Now I’ve tried this with VirtualBox and using the snapshot feature. This required that I start from clean desktop and painstakingly install and configure my development environment manually. I found this to be clunky and I didn’t trust my past self to have saved a snapshot from where I could start in case something went wrong. If something was broken, I’d have to step back through snapshots until I had one that I can safely start from and I’m almost back to square one.

Automated Desktops

A better way might be to treat desktops like we do servers, and create, destroy, and recreate them as needed. With this in mind, I put together an Ansible playbook from which I can run against a Vagrant Ubuntu instance, and voila, I can have as many desktops as I want, with individual configurations that are stored in version control.

I learned some things about Vagrant and Ansible along the way, and I may even create an actual Vagrant box for this but for now it does what I need. Now back to work…