Ansible Setup¶

We’ll use Ansible as our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to auto setup our test staging environment so we’ll experiment with installation and validation tests in this section. Most info here is pulled from the official Ansible 2.7 documentation.

Installation¶

Ubuntu installation is straight-forward. Ubuntu builds are available in a PPA here.

To configure the PPA on your machine and install ansible run these commands:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-add-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
$ sudo apt-get install ansible

# Verify install
$ ansible --version

# output should look similar to the following

ansible 2.5.1
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
configured module search path = [u'/home/hirosh7/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible
executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
python version = 2.7.15rc1 (default, Apr 15 2018, 21:51:34) [GCC 7.3.0]

Setting up servers and server connectivity¶

Details from this section come from Ansible: Post-Installl Setup instructions. In summary:

Add your target servers to the default /etc/ansible/hosts file
Generate your SSH key on your host Ansible server (e.g. ssh-keygen -t rsa -C “name@example.org” - Don’t specify a passkey)
Copy your public SSH key to your target servers (e.g. ssh-copy-id user@<target_server>)

To test connectivity:

# Assume your target server(s) are defined in the devserver' group in the /etc/ansible/hosts file
$ ansible devserver -m ping

# Sample output
<target server name> | SUCCESS => {
 "changed": false,
 "ping": "pong"
}

Testing out a sample playbook¶

Before putting together a playbook of plays, you can try out single (ad hoc) commands to get a feel for the types of things that can be done. Once you’re familiar with a few commands and return data, the next step will be to code them into a playbook.

Pulling Ansible Playbooks from Github¶

data goes here

Useful Sample Ad-Hoc Ansible Commands¶

ansible devserver -m command -a '<cmd line command (e.g. python --version)>'