As part of my ongoing effort to improve my DevOps skillset, I decided to re-architect how this blog was deployed. Previously, I had simply pushed the static site files to a GitHub respository and manually pulled down the new files to a webserver whenever I made an update to the site. For starters, I wanted to develop a workflow which would automatically deploy the website when I git push to my remote repository.

I recently came across this talk from Southeast Linux Fest by Jeff Propes. The talk mostly goes over the shortcomings of Ansible and various tips on how you can mitigate them (hence the name of the talk “Make Ansible Suck Less”). In particular, I found the trick he demonstrated at the beginning to mitigate the possibility of erroneously affecting multiple hosts when running a playbook quite useful. First, you add a “dummy host” to your inventory, that looks something like this:

Recently, I decided to start hosting a Minecraft server for me and a few of my friends. While this was mostly because…well…I wanted to play Minecraft, it also occured to me that this is an excellent project for a less experienced user to familiarize themselves with some key skills and concepts that any Linux administrator will find useful. By the end of this tutorial, we will have: A Minecraft server running for the gaming enjoyment of you and your friends.