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Ask HN: How do you document a server?

by rxlim on 2/10/17, 4:04 PM with 2 comments

  - Do you describe all steps from OS installation to application setup?
  - What do you use to create the documentation?
  - Where do you store the documentation?

• by snowcrshd on 2/10/17, 5:38 PM

  Hmm, interesting question. I'd like to know how other people do it.

  At work, we generally don't write narrative documentation for server setup. It requires quite the effort to make sure it doesn't go stale.

  Instead, we keep Ansible playbooks on a Git repository. Every change we make to the server setup is done through the playbooks. Git commits provide a history of the changes made (we usually write the why in the long commit message).

  Usually just having a README with information on how to run the playbooks and which distro the playbooks are based on is enough.

• by savethefuture on 2/10/17, 4:47 PM

  Recently, I've been wanting to document how I setup my servers. I would start from a blank slate base linux install and go from there, listing each command I run and what it does. Then building off each command into the next leading the reader through the steps of configuration and installation of software. This is all for a blog, so take that into consideration.