Ubuntu Setup simplifies those tedious tasks you have to repeat each time you setup a Ubuntu machine. For example, because there's a new addition to the development team (luckeee!), you're setting up a new Linode VPS (highly recommended!), or your harddrive died a horrible death (backups?).
Ubuntu Setup is also meant to "capture" requirements. Debian's
packaging system has made it so incredibly easy to install software
that we're prone to just sudo apt-get install ... and then forget
that we did. Which is awesome because as developers we're able to work
with little to no interruption. But the downside is that it's a bitch
to figure out what to tell other people to install when it comes time
to share with them.
We're also of the opinion that using Debian's packaging system over tools like bundler, pip, npm, maven, or whatever is always the right thing to do. We've pulled our hair out one too many times trying to repair a machine that was broken (usually in some really devious manner) by one of these other package managers. Also, we like to know that the software we choose to work with actually works and will be around a while. Getting a piece of software into the Debian archives is usually a reasonable vetting process.
# TODO: Setup salt master and minion.
./ubuntu-setup.sh
Ubuntu Setup does muck around with /etc/apt. For example, a few
package archive source lists are added (plus their signing keys), and
apt-get's default options are tweaked (e.g. recommended packages are
not installed).
The idea is to keep the default as lean-and-mean as possible. Cheaper disk sizes in the cloud. Quicker backups.
A connection to the the series of tubes is required.
About seven years ago Ubuntu Setup started out as a set of shell scripts. Since then other people have begun to solve the same problems in much more sophisticated ways. A swtich to Chef seemed looked like nothing more than swapping bash for ruby. We like Puppet's declarative syntax, but it makes simple tasks hard. We've been quite pleased with Salt.
https://github.com/rentalita/ubuntu-setup
Ubuntu Setup is brought to you by Rentalita under the MIT License.