Install Buddy

What is it?

Simple wrapper tool which relies on the native package manager to automate installing a list of packages, on a freshly installed Linux/OSX system.

Why?

From time to time, I end up reinstalling or switching Linux distos, and the initial setup to get things just right the way it was can be time-consuming. I wanted a simple tool that can bootstrap a fresh installation by automating the installation of additional packages so that I can be productive right away!

Check out my favorite list of packages.

Installation Prerequisite

• Supported distro
  • Alpine
  • Arch
  • Debian & flavors(Ubuntu, Mint, ElementaryOS etc.)
  • Fedora / CentOS
  • Gentoo
  • Solus
  • Mac OSX (via Homebrew)
  • Installing via a shell script (experimental)
• Modern version of Ruby is required to be installed.
• Default Package Manager fully updated (e.g apt-get update on Debian like)

Installation

Clone this repo. Create and/or modify a package-list YAML file. See example.

packages:
  - vim
  - git
  - the_silver_searcher:
    - alias: { Debian: "silversearcher-ag", Solus: "silver-searcher"}
    - skip: [ "CentOS" ]
  - snapd:
    - only: [ "Ubuntu" ]
  - powertop
  - brew:
    - shell: [ "/bin/bash -c \"$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)\"" ]

Usage: sudo ./bin/install-buddy -f <package_list_file>

Add --dry-run to pretend to install packages without actually installing them.

sudo ./bin/install-buddy -f ./conf/package-list-example.yml --dry-run
sudo ./bin/install-buddy -f ./conf/package-list-example.yml

Add --no-root to try force installation as non root and stop it from complaining (e.g: with homebrew)

./bin/install-buddy -f ./conf/package-list-example.yml --no-root

Package Alias Support

Some packages might be named differently depending on distro. Eg: the-silver-searcher, a faster alternative to ack-grep is named differently depending on distro. Look at the following example above on how to write it.

Skip package installation for some distros

Some times you may want to skip installing a package for a specific distro or distro family. For example, you might want to skip MacOSX when installing the docker package because on OSX it's not installed via homebrew.

Note: This feature can not be combined with the -only feature.

Installing packages "Only" on some distros

Some times you might want to restrict the installation of a package to only one distro name or family. This works similar to the -skip feature except you specify the distros to only install on.

Note: This feature can not be combined with the -skip feature.

Remote Install

Remote install allows you to run InstallBuddy on a remote system via SSH without having to install ruby or download this repo on it. In order for this to work the remote system should have SSH server running without any restrictions for root user to login. The recommended secure way to do this is to enable passwordless login for root using your public key for authentication.

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

PermitRootLogin without-password

Alternately you could set a temporary password for root user and enter that in (be prepared to enter the password multiple times!).

# If you don't have a public key
ssh-key -t rsa
# Copy content to clipboard
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | xclip -sel clip

# SSH to remote and become root
mkdir /root/.ssh
chmod 700 /root/.ssh

cat > /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
... copy content of clipboard with pub key
Ctrl + D

chmod 400 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

You also need to install some additional gems via bundle. From project directory

bundle install --without development

Finally to remote install run install-buddy without sudo:

# To do a dry run and see which commands will be executed on remote
./bin/install-buddy --dry-run -f ../my-packages.yml --remote 172.17.0.2

# Then remove --dry-run to perform an actual install
./bin/install-buddy -f ../my-packages.yml --remote 172.17.0.2