How to install all the packages that are on machine A onto machine B?

Question

I have a machine that has a bunch of user installed packages on top of a fresh Ubuntu 12.04 LTS install. I'd like to make a few machines than are essential clones, but manually looking up all the packages would be very burdensome.

Is there some way I can output a list of all user-installed packages and easily move that into a shell script that can then be run on other fresh Ubuntu installs?

Answer 1

This should be a start

sudo dpkg --set-selections < (ssh othermachine dpkg --get-selections)

Also consider

• puppet
• Ubuntu landscape