I've been frequently spinning up clean VMs for AI agents lately, and since the process was getting tedious, I created a script for the initial setup.
In short, I've packed in as much as possible, including everything an AI Agent might want.
sudo apt update -y && sudo apt install -y curl ca-certificates
sudo install -dm 755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fSs https://mise.en.dev/gpg-key.pub | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/mise-archive-keyring.asc 1> /dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/mise-archive-keyring.asc] https://mise.en.dev/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mise.list
sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install -y mise
echo 'eval "$(/usr/bin/mise activate bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
sudo apt install -y build-essential git wget unzip zip rsync tree make cmake pkg-config sqlite3 tmux entr moreutils
mise use -g node@24 rust@nightly uv python@3.10 fd jq yq bat fzf shellcheck shfmt
mise exec node -- npm i -g @openai/codex pnpm @anthropic-ai/claude-code
# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
# Add the repository to Apt sources:
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.sources <<EOF
Types: deb
URIs: https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu
Suites: $(. /etc/os-release && echo "${UBUNTU_CODENAME:-$VERSION_CODENAME}")
Components: stable
Architectures: $(dpkg --print-architecture)
Signed-By: /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
EOF
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y \
docker-ce \
docker-ce-cli \
containerd.io \
docker-buildx-plugin \
docker-compose-plugin \
docker-ce-rootless-extras \
uidmap
sudo systemctl disable --now docker.service docker.socket
sudo rm -f /var/run/docker.sock
dockerd-rootless-setuptool.sh install
sudo loginctl enable-linger "$USER"