Ansible

Ansible Collaborative

Automation for everyone No matter your role, or what your automation goals are, Ansible can help you demonstrate value, connect teams, and deliver efficiencies for your organization. Built on open source, Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is a hardened, tested subscription product that offers full life cycle support for organizations. Explore how Ansible can help you automate today—and scale for the future.

Tutorials, Resources

• Learn Linux TV - Getting started with Ansible
• Laying out roles, inventories and playbooks
• An evolving set of mac user creation, setup and maintenance playbooks being used at Ideas On Purpose
• Variable precedence: Where should I put a variable?

Directory structure

• ansible – Configuration of the host OS & required software
  • ansible/roles – Roles for Debian-based Docker & admin hosts and a Mac-based DevOps/SRE toolset
  • ansible/playbooks – Host-role assignments. The playbooks can be executed with the apply-*.sh scripts
  • ansible/inventory – Host specific environment configuration

Setup steps

1. From the repository root, install Ansible on the selected admin environment with sudo ansible/bootstrap-ansible.sh. This can be the Docker host in single-host mode. (See: Ansible control node)
2. Copy config-example/ansible to the ignored config/ansible overlay and configure its inventory and secret variables.
3. Add hosts to config/ansible/inventory/inventory.yaml.
4. Assign roles by adding hosts to the corresponding inventory groups, such as docker_hosts.
5. Run ansible/apply-<playbook>.sh from the repository root to execute a playbook.
   • If you use a non-root user and sudo requires a password (indicated by the “Missing sudo password” error message), use ansible/apply-<playbook>.sh --ask-become-pass and specify the password when requested (“BECOME password” message)
   • The playbook will set up passwordless sudo, so next time the --ask-become-pass parameter will not be required
6. When the administrative user is already created, use that user in the inventory instead of root (ansible_user: <adminuser>). This is more secure and also required by Homebrew.

For the complete infrastructure setup walkthrough using these playbooks, see Getting Started.

Bootstrapping hosts with authentication

1. Copy public SSH key, e.g.: ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub root@192.168.1.50
2. Run playbook with existing user (root or your admin user if already created)
3. From the repository root, verify one host with both inventory sources: ansible <host> -m ping -i ansible/inventory/inventory.yaml -i config/ansible/inventory/inventory.yaml

Useful options

The following parameters can be applied to ansible-playbook and the “apply…” scripts.

• -l, --limit - Limit Ansible run for a specific host (or host group). Example: ./apply-homelab.sh --limit <host>
• -v, --verbose - Causes Ansible to print more debug messages. Adding multiple -v will increase the verbosity, the builtin plugins currently evaluate up to -vvvvvv. A reasonable level to start is -vvv, connection debugging might require -vvvv. Example: ./apply-homelab.sh -v

See man ansible-playbook for more.

GUI

GitHub - ansible/awx: AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is one of the upstream projects for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.