I don't know that I'd call it lighter weight than ansible, but I like SaltStack a lot for this kind of thing. It's very good for letting you apply states to hosts based on tags you give those hosts, so you can have files that go to all hosts, files that go to some set of hosts, etc. It does require a central server, but I consider that a feature.
--Gregory On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 11:41:07AM +0000, Chris Green wrote: > I have a dozen or so computers around the place, mostly running Debian > or a derivative (Rasberry Pi OS). > > I'm looking for a lightweight way to maintain their root-owned > configuration files, things like added scripts in /etc/cron.daily, > postfix configuration, systemd additions, etc. > > While Ansible will do this it feels like overkill to me, **all** I > really need is to manage files, I'm quite happy starting and stopping > systems 'manually' as it were. > > Is there some sort of minimal ansible that will let me do central > management of root-owned files? > > -- > Chris Green > ยท > >
