You are correct that you want to move to a configuration management system like ansible. I wrote up a tutorial on configuration management that has automated te

You are correct that you want to move to a configuration management system like ansible. I wrote up a tutorial on configuration management that has automated tests at every stage and has the student write some tests. https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/ https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/ I should sit down and put more emphasis on testing when I have more time, but if you work through that it will teach you the basics of configuration management and get you to doing a deploy of django+postgresql+gunicorn+nginx on a digital ocean machine.