Posts tagged Ansible
Installing Ansible with Python
- 14 July 2023
In posts Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 22.04 and Installing Ansible on Debian 12 Ansible was installed via the package manager. Another option is to install Ansible with Python in a virtual environment so you can have multiple Ansible versions installed on the same machine.
Since Ansible is written in Python, it can be installed in a Python virtual environment which is a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages. The virtual environment can be created with the venv module, which is part of the Python since version 3.4.
Installing Ansible on Debian 12
- 09 July 2023
Ansible is a great tool for automating tasks on multiple servers. It is easy to learn and use and it is very powerful. Ansible is written in Python and it uses SSH to connect to the servers or devices you want to manage like routers, switches, etc. There needs to be a central server where Ansible is installed and from there you can manage all your servers or devices.
In this post, we will create that central server and install Ansible on Debian 12 “bookworm” from the official Debian repositories. The first step is to update the system to the latest packages so that we can install Ansible from the official Debian repositories.
Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 22.04
- 29 May 2023
Ansible is a great tool for automating tasks on multiple servers. It is easy to learn and use and it is very powerful. Ansible is written in Python and it uses SSH to connect to the servers or devices you want to manage like routers, switches, etc. There needs to be a central server where Ansible is installed and from there you can manage all your servers or devices.
In this post, we will create that central server and install Ansible on Ubuntu 22.04 from the official Ubuntu repositories or from the Ansible PPA repositories depending on your needs. The first step is to update the system to the latest packages so that we can install Ansible from the official Ubuntu repositories.
Switching to molecule-plugins
- 28 April 2023
Ansible roles are a great way to organize and share your infrastructure-as-code between projects. Those roles can be tested with Molecule, which is a great tool to test your roles against multiple platforms and Ansible versions. Running these tests in a CI/CD pipeline is a great way to ensure that your roles are working as expected and that you don’t introduce regressions.
These tests can be executed in different forms, but the most common one is to use Docker containers. This is one of the configurations for Molecule, and it works great. The example workflow below shows how to run Molecule tests in a GitHub Actions pipeline:
Fix an Ansible-lint key-order violation
- 25 February 2023
Ansible allows for structured configurations on how to deploy applications and servers, but also for repetitive tasks. All these actions are defined in YAML files that rely on indentation and this is where Ansible can act in a way that isn’t expected. With yamllint most formatting and layout issues can be found, but with ansible-lint also common mistakes for Ansible can be detected.
As ansible-lint is a step in the CI-workflow a dependency upgrade started a CI-workflow to scan all Ansible Playbooks to be scanned with the latest version of Ansible-lint and found a violation that must be resolved before the pull request can be successfully merged. Running Ansible-lint after checking out the code the error shown below was found and indicates that the order of the keys in YAML isn’t in the correct order.
Using bare variables in Ansible 2.8
- 02 June 2019
Ansible 2.8 was released in May 2019 and later in May came to Fedora 30 in package form. So the first tests could be done to see what needed to be done to switch from 2.7 to 2.8 and don’t generate a lot of stopped GitLab CI jobs due to new warnings and errors. Let’s start with one warning that needs to be resolved before the 2.12 release and also is given on many third-party roles.
The example code above is simple enough to get the warning about CONDITIONAL_BARE_VARS. We could opt for disabling the warning in ansible.cfg and move forward, but as this is the technical debt we don’t want to get more and resolve the current debt as quickly as possible.