I am not an expert in Ansible, or any other software of the kind, but I think this is one of the easier use-cases of such a program. I wrote an ansible script to compile emacs from source, after some initial configuration, and it serves me pretty well.
I started with Ansible for automation, and still use it, but have abandoned it for setting up my personal environment. I still use it to set up services, such as sshd, webserver, printer, samba, smartd etc. I found it was more cumbersome for personal environment setup than my script method. My method of re-initializing my environment rests on three pillars:
Ansible, for server/OS setup. Things run by init/systemd, involving anything outside of $HOME basically
Backup, using borgmatic. I use this to restore most things in $HOME, except random dotfiles. My documents, my checked out git repos, etc.
Script "setuplets". These I run on demand, to set up my environment piece by piece. Perhaps I do not want to restore my programming environment just because I want to have my custom prompt on a host, for example.
Finding the balance between these have been difficult. What bootstraps what, and especially, how to handle credentials. My backup is encrypted, but how would I make sure I had the keys to restore it? I could restore it from my pass password store, but how would I get the gnupg keys in place first? I have not solved this completely satisfactorily yet
