As you will have seen from the examples in this chapter, the kickstart and pre-seed files are quite prescriptive in what they can do. For most purposes, they should be perfectly adequate, allowing you to build a machine suitable for further customization with Ansible. Indeed, much of the rest of this book is dedicated to how you would manage and automate configuration management across an estate of servers, built per the details in this and the preceding chapters.
However, what if your enterprise has a task (or tasks) that absolutely has to be performed at build time—perhaps for security compliance (which we shall explore in Chapter 13, Using CIS Benchmarks), for example? Luckily, both of the technologies we have discussed here provide an option for that. Let's first take a look at how you might perform custom...