Copy an existing system with ansible?

Question

Using ansible, what is the easiest way of creating a "copy" of an existing system?

(The system in my case being LinuxMint 13)

Would I have to create a playbook by hand based on the output of dpkg --get-selections and various config files or is there an easier way?

(Maybe some export/backup tool that can take over the manual labour?)

Answer 1

Ansible is not really designed to "copy" an existing system. You'll have to create a playbook by hand.

You could take a look at https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint. It's created to reverse-engineer servers. However, it does not support Mint 13, its output is Chef, Puppet or Bash, not Ansible and it has not been updated in a few months...But that project does what you are thinking of.