Getting Started with Ansible

Brendon Thiede

Development Manager @ Vertafore

Infrastructure as Code

• Version control
• Enforcement of desired state
• Automatic changes

Ansible Features

• No node agent installation (works over SSH)
• Based on Python
• YAML for configuration
• Jinja2 templating
• Custom modules can be any language; just need to produce JSON
• WebUI (AnsibleWorks AWX ) is separate and lacking

Concepts

Configuration

---
# group_vars/all

mysqlservice: mysqld
mysql_port: 3306

sites
    - nginx_hostname: www.mama-bear-naturals.com
      wp_db_password: "{{ vault_wp_db_password_live }}"
    - nginx_hostname: beta.mama-bear-naturals.com
      wp_db_password: "{{ vault_wp_db_password_beta }}"

Use ansible-vault to encrypt/decrypt

Roles: tasks

---
# This playbook will install MariaDB and create db

- name: Install MariaDB package
  yum: name={{ item }} state=installed
  with_items:
   - mariadb-server
   - MySQL-python
   - libselinux-python
   - libsemanage-python

- name: Create Mysql configuration file
  template: src=my.cnf.j2 dest=/etc/my.cnf
  notify:
  - restart mariadb

Roles: templates

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
user=mysql
symbolic-links=0
port={{ mysql_port }}

[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mariadb/mysqld.pid

Roles: handlers

---
- name: restart nginx
  service: name=nginx state=restarted enabled=yes

Inventory

[wordpress-server]
troyvm ansible_user=root ansible_port=9922 ansible_host=208.64.37.13

Playbook

---
- name: Install WordPress, MariaDB, Nginx, and PHP-FPM
  hosts: wordpress-server
  remote_user: root

  roles:
    - common
    - mariadb
    - nginx
    - php-fpm
    - wordpress

Ship it!

ansible-playbook site.yml -e@group_vars/vault \
--vault-password-file=~/.vault_pass.txt