Quickstart¶

This quickstart walks through the process of using Vagrant and running the charlesreid1 playbooks against a Vagrant machine.

Table of Contents¶

Vagrant Setup
Cloud Node Setup
Run Ansible
- Set Up Vault Secret
- Run the Base Playbook
Change Variables

Vagrant Setup¶

Vagrant is a command-line wrapper around VirtualBox and allows setting up one or more virtual machines to test out Ansible playbooks locally.

To run Vagrant boxes, you need a Vagrantfile. One is provided in this repo, but if you don't have one you can run vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64 to create a new one.

Start Vagrant Machines¶

The following commands require a Vagrantfile. Use the provided one or modify it for your needs.

Start a vagrant virtual machine with:

vagrant up

Provision Vagrant Machines¶

Run the initial setup play with Ansible using the provision.yml provision playbook:

ANSIBLE_CONFIG="vagrant.cfg" vagrant provision

Configure Ansible-Vagrant SSH Info¶

Vagrant provides info about how to connect to the Vagrant machine(s) created using the ssh-config verb:

vagrant ssh-config

Copy this information into the vagranthosts inventory file so that Ansible knows how to connect to the Vagrant boxes.

Cloud Node Setup¶

Different cloud providers set up their compute nodes differently, but the following is required to do on a cloud node before you can run Ansible on it.

Ensure your operating system has a version of python3 available from the command line
Ensure the public SSH key of the machine from which you are running Ansible matches the public SSH key in the authorized keys file that will be installed via Ansible
- The authorized keys file is located in roles/ssh/files/authorized_keys
Ensure the hosts file for this cloud node contains a username that actually exists on the remote system

Run Ansible¶

Set Up Vault Secret¶

Warning

The vault secret should match the original secret used to encrypt the vault. If you don't have it, delete vault and start over.

Before running Ansible with the Ansible-Vagrant config file, it will expect the vault secret to be in a file called .vault_secret in the current directory.

Create this file before proceeding.

Example .vault_secret file:

this_is_my_super_strong_password!

To use this file to access variables in the vault, pass the vault password file using the flag:

ansible-playbook \
        --vault-password-file=.vault_secret \
        <other-flags>

Run the Base Playbook¶

To run a playbook, use the ANSIBLE_CONFIG environment variable to specify the Ansible-Vagrant config file, and use the ansible-playbook command:

ANSIBLE_CONFIG="vagrant.cfg" ansible-playbook \
        --vault-password-file=.vault_secret \
        base.yml

The config file specifies the inventory file, SSH key, vault password, and log file to use, among other details.

Change Variables¶

You can modify variables in the group_vars/main.yml file by adding additional variable definitions in YAML format:

$ cat group_vars/main.yml 

...

my_var_1: "red"
my_var_2: "blue"

Alternatively, you can pass custom variable values on the command line. (This is how we specify the machine name when running playbooks.) Here, we set a few example variables:

$ ANSIBLE_CONFIG="my_config_file.cfg" \
        ansible-playbook \
        --vault-password-file=.vault_secret \
        -i hosts \
        --extra-vars "my_var_1=red,my_var_2=blue" \
        playbook.yml

See Ansible Playbooks for next steps.