I love the notion of a clean, repeatable install. In my side projects, I've his­tor­i­cal­ly ac­com­plished this through strict doc­u­men­ta­tion practices and directory or­ga­ni­za­tion. However, this process inevitably breaks down for me when a machine becomes multi-purpose.

Either locally or in the cloud, I'll end up installing packages, hacking together con­fig­u­ra­tion, or otherwise making the en­vi­ron­ment murky. In fact, the server that currently hosts this blog is a perfect example. This instance hosts this site, riiga.net, and has been a sandbox for toy projects I've worked on over the past two years.

While I'm reasonably confident I can redeploy this machine within a couple of hours, it would be far …continue.