Warm up for Automated configuration of web applications

Imagine you are a end-user, not a programmer, not a system administrator. You rent a virtual private server on a cloud provider, and you want to install applications on it.

Now look at the WordPress wiki page, and ask yourself: can you do that? Should you need to do all that in order do install a web application?

Now come back to your original self, a student who can program and is willing to participate in Outreachy/Summer of Code, and ask yourself: how would you automate that configuration in a way that survives upgrades, e.g. to the next version of Debian, or to the next security upgrade.

Warm up task 0: get yourself a Debian machine

It can be a virtual machine, it can be your physical machine. In the Debian community we like when people actually use Debian. ;-)

Warm up task 1: get chef running

Warm up task 2: a more realistic setup