I've done something like this in the past, it works really well. Have you used Poudriere? I never tried it, but it sounds promising. Ansible is a good idea as well. I just wrote some shell scripts that parsed a file with some packages and hooks to set up the jails.

These days I have my FreeBSD server providing NFS for a k3s instance on a different box.

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avhception 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, I have used Poudriere. Every time I want to talk about it, I have to look up how exactly that is spelled! My usecase was that I needed stuff to be linked against newer PostgreSQL client libs than were in quarterly.

I thought about using Linux and simply providing storage from FreeBSD using NFS, but that would require 2 machines or a VM that connects to the host using NFS or something... meh.

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ahepp 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I don’t know why I googled around and thought “Poudriere” was the one.

I was thinking of Bastille, which is for managing jails

	▲	avhception 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah! No, I haven't used Bastille. I didn't want to rely on fancy wrappers that might go away or change their behavior, so I wrote a shell script that orchestrates some shell tools and ZFS into creating a jail, and that in turn is consumed from Ansible. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it's guaranteed to still be there tomorrow - and that was one of my goals, getting away from all the churn that came from the Linux / Docker ecosystem and finally settle on something!