Ansible

https://www.ansible.com/

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. Instal Ansible on the admin workstation with bootstrap-ansible.sh. (See: Ansible control node)
2. Configure variables in inventory/group_vars/
3. Add hosts to inventory/inventory.yaml
4. Assign roles to hosts in playbooks/
5. Run apply-<playbook>.sh to execute a playbook
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.

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. Verify the connection with: ansible all -m ping

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

https://github.com/ansible/awx

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.