Depends on what you are doing. But you can take the path of app / os images.
My home network is just openwrt, and I use make plus a few scripts and imagebuilder to create images that I flash, including configs.
For rpi I actually liked cloud-init, but it is too flaky for complicated stuff. In that case I would nowerdays rather dockerize it and use systemd + podman or a kubelet in standalone mode. Secrets on a mount point. Make it so that the boot partition of the rpi is the main config folder. That way you can locally flash a golden image.
Anything that mutates a server is brittle as the starting point is a moving target. Building images (or fancy tarballs like docker) makes it way more likely that you get consistent results.
My home network is just openwrt, and I use make plus a few scripts and imagebuilder to create images that I flash, including configs.
For rpi I actually liked cloud-init, but it is too flaky for complicated stuff. In that case I would nowerdays rather dockerize it and use systemd + podman or a kubelet in standalone mode. Secrets on a mount point. Make it so that the boot partition of the rpi is the main config folder. That way you can locally flash a golden image.
Anything that mutates a server is brittle as the starting point is a moving target. Building images (or fancy tarballs like docker) makes it way more likely that you get consistent results.