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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.
Ara server is up and running. Open quickstart page and navigate to Ara WEB UI
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/static-server/ansible-lint.txt
You can view the resulted txt file with static file server, filebrowser.
Ansible report
Ansible-report is a small utility that generates several reports from your ansible project - visualizes inventory, represents all plays in a format of graphs, generates interactive static website with information about hosts etc.
Create your own ansible project, cd and execute
ansible-report
Ansible-report is a shell script that simply executes several ansible tools in one shot:
- ansible-lint
- ansible-cmdb
- ansible-inventory-grapher
- ansible-playbook-grapher (for all ansible plays in the folder)
You can also use any of the ansible tools separately.
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
ansible -m setup --tree out/ all
ansible-cmdb out/ > overview.html
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/static-server/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.