Introduction¶
I’ve started to get familiar with Ansible because, apart of getting more and more accepted for OSP-related tasks and installation, I wanted to automate some tasks we needed to setup some servers for the OpenStack group I work for.
First of all, it’s recommended to get latest version of ansible (tested on RHEL7 and Fedora), but in order not to mess with the system python libraries, it’s convenient to use python’s virtual environments.
A virtual Environment allows to create a ‘chroot’-like environment that might contain different library versions to the one installed with the system (but be careful as if it’s not kept track as part of the usually system patching process, it might become a security concern).
virtualenvs¶
For creating a virtualenv, we require the package python-virtualenv
installed on our system and executing virtualenv
and a target folder, for example:
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From this point, we’ve a base virtualenv installed, but as we would like to install more packages inside we’ll first need to ‘enter’ into it:
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And from there, we can list the available/installed packages:
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Now, all packages we install using pip
will get installed to this folder, leaving system libraries intact.
Once we finished, to return back to system’s environment, we’ll execute deactivate
.
pipsi
¶
In order to simplify the management we can make use of pipsi
which not only allows to install Python packages as we’ll normally do with pip
, but also, takes care of doing proper symlinks so the installed packages are available directly for execution.
If our distribution provides it, we can install pipsi
on our system:
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But if not, we can use this workaround (for example, on RHEL7)
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From this point, we can use pipsi
to take care of installation and maintenance (can do upgrades, removal, etc) of our python packages.
For example, we can install ansible
by executing:
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This might fail, as ansible, does some compiling and for doing so, it might require some development libraries on your system, have care of that to satisfy requirements for the packages.
Prepare for ansible utilization¶
At this point we’ve the ansible
binary available for execution as pipsi
did take care of setting up the required symlinks, etc
Ansible uses an inventory file (can be provided on command line) so it can connect to the hosts listed there and apply playbooks
which define the different actions to perform.
This file, for example, can consist of just a simple list of hosts to connect to like:
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And for starting we create a simple playbook, for example a hardware asset inventory:
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This will act on all hosts, as user root and will run a task which prints a debug message crafted based on the contents of some of the facts
that ansible gathers on the execution host.
To run it is quite easy:
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This has connected to the target host, and returned a message with hostname, ip address, some empty fields, total memory and bios date.
This is a quite simple script, but for example, we can use ansible
to deploy ansible
binary on our target host using other modules available, in this case, for simplicity, we’ll not be using pipsi
for ansible installation.
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At this point, the system should have ansible available from within the virtualenv we’ve created and should be available when executing:
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Have fun!
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