Erase your darlings: immutable infrastructure for mutable systems - Graham Christensen

ID: eb460809-7d98-43ce-a157-a3521fa4a876
ROAM_REFS: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
REVIEW_SCORE: 0.0
MTIME: [2024-12-25 Wed 15:54]

Deeply terrifying inbox-zero quest for intentionality around working machine state.

I'm a hoarder. Like Bernadette doing KonMari, I notice that this approach to daily-driver maintenance is irrelevant to me in its highest form. My personal machine is a pet, not cattle.

Nonetheless, we can understand a lot about how to keep our pets well-groomed from this approach. We ultimately want to create a stable workflow to elevate state to configuration.

Opting out

Before we can opt in to saving data, we must opt out of saving data by default. I do this by setting up my filesystem in a way that lets me easily and safely erase the unwanted data, while preserving the data I do want to keep.

My preferred method for this is using a ZFS dataset and rolling it back to a blank snapshot before it is mounted. A partition of any other filesystem would work just as well too, running mkfs at boot, or something similar. If you have a lot of RAM, you could skip the erase step and make / a tmpfs.

This node is a singleton!