Automating the installation of Zammad on Debian via Ansible: nightmares and scary things!

Quite frankly, Debian is not a platform I like very much, and hence it is not a platform I’m used to. However, sometimes, I have to cope with it. In particular, I had a rich set of problems when automating the Zammad Helpdesk on a Debian 12 system via Ansible. First of all, Zammad on Debian by defaults wants a PostgreSQL database, and this is a good thing according to me! However, if you remove the zammad package and try to install it over, everything seems to work until you remove the zammad database from your PostgreSQL cluster. You will start getting errors about the creation of the database! And moreover, the database installation instructions (i.e., /opt/zammad/bin/rake db:create) will fail too! So I kindly asked for help on Zammad Support Forum without any luck at all. At the end, it turned out, that I had to remove the Debian package with the --purge option and I have to remove also /opt/zammad to let the system reinitialize the database from scratch. All the steps are documented on my own reply to the Zammad Support Forum Query.