Klytron Workstation Setup

The Disaster Recovery Challenge

As a developer balancing multiple clients, personal SaaS products, and open-source packages, a hardware failure or system crash represents a significant risk. Rebuilding a complex development environment from scratch—configuring dotsfiles, installing packages, setting up Docker, and restoring encrypted credentials—can easily consume an entire day of lost productivity.

To eliminate this downtime, I designed and built the Klytron Workstation Setup.

Workstation-as-Code

This project encapsulates the concept of "Workstation-as-Code." It is a fully automated Bash provisioning script that rebuilds my entire Linux developer environment from a bare OS installation to a production-ready state in under an hour.

The pipeline executes flawlessly:

1. Security First: Automatically unlocks my GPG vault.
2. Configuration Sync: Uses Chezmoi to pull and link all dotfiles.
3. Dependency Management: Installs all required APT, Flatpak, and Snap packages.
4. Custom Installs: Automatically downloads and installs .deb packages for core tools like VeraCrypt and Obsidian.
5. Development Stacks: Configures Docker, DDEV, and NVM.
6. System Tuning: Applies Linux system stability and performance tuning.

Outcomes

• Reduced workstation recovery time from 8+ hours to under 60 minutes.
• Ensured absolute consistency across multiple physical machines.
• Created a shareable, open-source model demonstrating advanced operational and DevOps thinking.