Getting started with Ansible

There are a ton of buzzwords thrown around every single day.  So many that its sometimes hard to determine what is legit and what isn't.  One of the words that I have paid attention to and come to really love is ansible.

To quickly sum up what ansible is, it's an automation tool that allows you to run a command or a set of commands across multiple machines.  This is extremely handy, for instance, if you have a bunch of machines acting as web servers and you need to shut down the web server portion for maintenance.

Previously you would have had to log in to each machine and issue the necessary commands.  But with ansible, you can simply put the commands in one file (called a playbook) and then run that playbook again the machines in question.

I would cover how to install ansible, but considering people work on different systems, I will just say that ansible has a pretty good set of docs on this already.  After you have installed the software, you will need a directory structure that looks something like the following:

ansible
    |
    |___ playbooks/
    |             |_____  .yml
    |
    |___ .ansible_hosts
    |
    |___ ansible.cfg

   You don't have to call the top directory ansible, but it helps so that you remember what is in there.  The playbooks directory is needed and under that is where you store the playbooks, which are in yaml format (thus the .yml extension).

The ansible.cfg file has a lot of options and you are going to want to read up on how to configure that.  As for the .ansible_hosts file, this is where you list the hosts that are under your conrtol and that you want to act upon.  In there you can list a single host or a group of hosts.  You can ready about how to specify your hosts in the ansible sites Inventory documentation.

The way that I have one of mine configured is so that it prompts me for the sudo password so that it can run all the commands that it needs to, with sudo.  As an example, I have a playbook called df.yml that will do a df on the set of specified hosts.  The df.yml file looks like this:

---
- hosts: "{{ group }}"
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: df
      sudo: yes
      command: 'df -h'

Please keep in mind that this is a yaml file and the format above is specific to yaml.  If you look at the hosts line, there are no hosts specified.  Instead, it simply says {{ group }}.  This is a variable that will be expected from the command line when I run the playbook.   In my .ansible_hosts file, I have a section that looks like this:

[ hostgroupname ]

host1

host2

host3

To run the df.yml play on that group, I run it as follows:

ansible-playbook playbooks/df.yml -v -i ./.ansible.hosts -k --extra-vars "group=hostgroupname"

That is being run from the ansible directory and referencing everything with that being the root.  Notice the '--extra-vars' option and the 'group=hostgroupname' at the end.  That is where the  {{ group }} is pulled from.  Ansible will take that and run the commands in the file on each host in that group.

There is a lot more configuration that can (and will) be done for ansible.  Particularly, I will be setting up my ssh key on all the servers, that way the script just runs, other than prompting for the sudo password.  (Yes, my script currently prompts me for my password to connect via ssh, but that is my current configuration and destined to change when I find the two minutes to do it).

So, that is a slight intro to ansible.  Remember to bookmark the ansible documentation.   Hopefully you are able to get it working quickly and enjoy its use as I am.