alnoda-workspaces/workspaces/ansible-terraform-workspace

Ansible-Terraform Workspace

Alnoda workspace with Ansible and Terraform toolchain. Create, provision, visualize and manage infrastructures, schedule maintenance tasks.

Why this images

1. If you don't want to install all of those tools separately.
2. If you need self-hosted environment to create infrastructures and schedule maintenance ansible playbooks.

Start

docker run --name space-1 -d -p 8020-8040:8020-8040 --restart=always alnoda/ansible-terraform-workspace

Open localhost:8020

Links

Alnoda docs
Alnoda Hub

Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.

Ansible-Terraform workspace contains a small example Terraform project that creates a server on the Scaleway cloud

cd /home/examples/terraform-scaleway/ && terraform init

If you want to try, set your Scaleway credentials as environment variable in your workspace. Add the following lines to /home/abc/.zshrc:

export SCW_DEFAULT_PROJECT_ID=<YOUR_PROJECT_ID>
export SCW_ACCESS_KEY=<YOUR_ACCESS_KEY>
export SCW_SECRET_KEY=<YOUR_SECRET_KEY>

Restart terminal, and execute

cd /home/examples/terraform-scaleway/ && terraform plan

Create Scaleway infrastructure with

cd /home/examples/terraform-scaleway/ && terraform apply

Terraform Rover

Rover - is a Terraform visualizer with browser-based UI. Rover helps to better understand Terraform state and planned changes. To see how Rover works, you can use a basic Terraform example in folder /home/examples/terraform-scaleway/. Initialize Terraform project first

cd /home/examples/terraform-scaleway/ && terraform init

and start Rover to visualize terraform state

rover --workingDir /home/examples/terraform-scaleway/

If you have followed hands-on the tutorial from the previous section (terraform report from the terraform-aws-free-tier repo), you can visualize it with Rover:

rover --workingDir /home/project/aws-example/src/free-tier

Open Rover from the workspace UI

Blast Radius

Blast Radius is a tool for reasoning about Terraform dependency graphs with interactive visualizations. You can try Blast Radius - launch workspace and visualize an example Terraform project.

cd /home/examples/terraform-scaleway && terraform init
blast

Go to workspace UI and open Blast Radius

Terraform Inframap

Terraform Inframap can visualize terraform state

inframap generate terraform.tfstate | dot -Tpng > graph.png

Ansible

This tutorial is a little demonstration of the included ansible toolset. Workspace has an example ansible play which installs several installs packages. We will use this playbook for some of the examples. For other examples, create your own ansible project.

To run an example ansible play, open terminal and execute

cd /home/examples/ansible-local 
ansible-playbook install-packages.yml

Ansible Ara

Ansible ARA Records Ansible and makes it easier to understand and troubleshoot. Ansible Ara is fully configured in the Ansible-Terraform workspace - it captures any execution (manual or scheduled) of any ansible playbook.

Ansible Lint

Ansible Lint is a command-line tool for linting playbooks, roles and collections aimed towards any Ansible users. Cd to the folder with your Ansible project and execute

cd /home/examples/ansible-local
ansible-lint --nocolor > /home/project/ansible-lint.txt

You can view the resulted txt file with static file server or filebrowser.

Ansible-cmdb

Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible's fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page (and other things) containing system configuration information.

Cd to the folder with your Ansible project and execute

cd /home/examples/ansible-local
ansible -m setup --tree out/ all
ansible-cmdb out/ > /home/project/overview.html

You can view the resulted txt file with Serve (static file server)

Ansible inventory grapher

Ansible inventory grapher creates a dot file suitable for use by graphviz. Cd to the folder with your Ansible project and execute

ansible-inventory-grapher all | dot -Tpng > /home/project/my.png

Ansible Playbook Grapher

Ansible Playbook Grapher - is a command line tool that creates a graph representing your Ansible playbook plays, tasks and roles. The aim of this project is to have an overview of your playbook. Cd to the folder with your Ansible project and execute

ansible-playbook-grapher --include-role-tasks example.yml -o /home/static-server/example

Ansible Doctor

Ansible Doctor is a simple annotation like documentation generator based on Jinja2 templates. while ansible-doctor comes with a default template called readme, it is also possible to write your own templates.

The first step is to identify if the given folder is an Ansible role. This check is very simple, if the folder contains a sub-directory called tasks is MUST be an Ansible role! :)

After the successful check, ansible-doctor will try to read some static files into a dictionary:

• defaults/main.yml
• meta/main.yml

Cd to the folder with your Ansible project and execute

ansible-doctor -o /home/static-server/ roles/example_production

Schedule Ansible playbook executions

Ansible-Terraform workspace has 2 tools (Cronicle and ARA) that make it simple and convenient to use Ansible for periodic tasks and jobs. For example, maintenance jobs for your cloud infrastructure. This is especially handy if you run this workspace on a remote server.

• Cronicle - allows to schedule tasks and jobs, and lets you observe executions using a nice UI
• Ansible Ara - tracks all executions of ansible playbooks (manual or scheduled), and has nice UI that provides informationn about every step of every playbook execution

You can try scheduling an example ansible playbook with Cronicle

NOTE: Scheduling Ansible playbooks is especially useful if you launch Workspace on a remote server rather than on your local laptop.