Our First Ansible Playbook

Published in

Apprehend

3 min readMay 4, 2019

Ansible is a configuration management and has the same breath as Chef, Puppet and Salt. When we talk configuration management, we are talking writing some configurations to ensure the state of our servers (packages installed, file permissions, services are running, etc). In this tutorial, we will install nginx package to our server.

Let’s create our first playbook and we will use Vagrant as our test server. We also will use VirtualBox as our provider. Ensure we have Virtual Box and Vagrant installed in our machine.

# Virtual Box sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.0 # Download vagrant
$ wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/x.x.x/vagrant_x.x.x_x86_64.deb
$ sudo gdebi vagrant_x.x.x_x86_64.deb

Now, ensure we also have Ansible installed in our machine.

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

This is the final state of our workspace after this session.

playbooks-01
├── ansible.cfg
├── files
│   └── nginx.conf
├── hosts
├── templates
│   └── index.html.j2
├── Vagrantfile
└── web-notls.yml

Let’s begin!

$ mkdir playbooks-01
$ cd playbooks-01
$ vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64
$ vagrant up

Note: The first time we do vagrant up, it will download the machine image.

Then, let’s create our hosts file. But, check the ssh configuration first.

$ vagrant ssh-config# The output of ssh-config
Host default
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /home/teddyaryono/workspace/sandbox-ansible/playbooks-01/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

Create our hosts file.

$ nano hosts# Content of hosts file
[webservers]
testserver ansible_ssh_host=127.0.0.1 ansible_ssh_port=2222

Ensure you can reach your vagrant server.

$ ansible testserver -m pingtestserver | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}

Then, create the rest of the files.

$ mkdir templates files
$ touch files/nginx.conf templates/index.html.j2
$ touch web-notls.yml# Content of nginx.conf
server {
  listen 80 default_server;
  listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
  
  root /usr/share/nginx/html;
  index index.html index.htm;server_name localhost;location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  }
}# Content of index.html.j2
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Welcome to Ansible</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>nginx, configured by Ansible</h1>
    <p>If you can see this, Ansible successfully installed nginx.</p><p></p>
  </body>
</html># Content of web-notls.yml
- name: Configure webserver with nginx
  hosts: webservers
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: install nginx
      apt: name=nginx update_cache=yes- name: copy nginx config file
      copy: src=files/nginx.conf dest=/etc/nginx/sites-available/default- name: enable configuration
      file: >
        dest=/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
        src=/etc/nginx/sites-available/default
        state=link- name: copy index.html
      template: src=templates/index.html.j2 dest=/usr/share/nginx/html/index.html mode=0644- name: restart nginx
      service: name=nginx state=restarted

Finally, run the ansible-playbook to begin the provisioning.

ansible-playbook web-notls.yml

Below is the sample output of our provisioning result.

Then, we can access the webserver in the guest machine from our host machine.

Cheers!

Our First Ansible Playbook

Written by Teddy Aryono