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Any (configuration)file can be installed and/or templated with both Ansible and Salt. This includes whatever Nginx has for configuration.

I'm not 100% with both, but I guess you have nginx be installed in some dedicated pillar/playbook and you can have your application pillar/playbook include templated configuration files to be inserted into /etc/nginx/conf.d and notify the service to be reloaded somehow.




That much I know.

But when it's clearly a scenario that everyone using Nginx will be writing these templates, surely it's better to have a well maintained master copy of them.

The complexity usually comes in having multiple projects wanting to modify the template(s) to wire themselves up.

A good sign for config tools is a feature rich and well maintained recipe/playbook (whatever you want to call it) that is able to do the non-trivial things (most deploy scripts for nginx don't seem to deal with SSL particularly elegantly with all of the options involved).

Puppet does well at this, but I dislike the heavy dependencies that some of the modules have. For example if you just wanted to install nginx you're going to end up here: https://github.com/jfryman/puppet-nginx and will discover that you have dependencies https://github.com/jfryman/puppet-nginx/blob/master/Modulefi... and will also need to install: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-concat https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-apt and https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-stdlib . One of which has their build failing.

What I look for in a config tool is such good defaults for handling these complex (but commonplace) scenarios, that the recipes/modules/playbooks are mature, dependency-free and well-maintained.

I guess I'm spoiled by programming in Go, I've got used to the idea that the language includes a stdlib comprehensive enough that 90% of what you need (even with those complex things like "give me a web server") is all built in.

That's the problem I'm trying to solve whenever I consider abandoning Puppet... dependency hell.

But I also remember the pains when I first used Puppet: cross-cutting concerns and complex configurations.




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