I manage MapR based large scale infrastructure running on on prem dc's. As part of configuration management enhancement we have written several of playbooks and keeping everything in github. Now I dont want anyone to download/clone those repo local to Ansible client nodes and run it from there. Is there a way where i can run playbooks from ansible without downloading to local machine. So basically what i want, a script/playbook where i pass which playbook to run, it should download that playbook and run it locally.
You're looking for some web interface that users will simply run your tasks, and in the background it will execute Ansible.
There are many methods to achieve what you need, however most likely you're looking for any of this:
AWX project - official ansible web interface
Jenkins or Rundeck - more bloated software that you can create your own "jobs" for users to interact with, create CI/CD flows and cron tasks to run any time you need.
You can also look into workflow automation, such as Airflow
There are alternatives to all the mentions I put, so be sure to check everything when deciding what you need.
Related
I have several roles that run actions on a remote database that executes sentences for user and privilege creation.
I have seen molecule used to test playbooks that run against a single host, but I am unsure of how you could setup a second container to run a docker instance in the same network as the molecule container (similar to a docker-compose setup). However I have not been able to find a setup like this in the documentation.
Is there a recommended way to run molecule tests with external dependencies? Or should I just use docker-compose or similar to run my tests?
There is a 'prepare' stage in Molecule specifically for that. You need to separate questions:
where external resource (database) is run?
why and how it's configured?
Those are very separate, and mixing them together is a bad idea.
For 1 there are different answers:
It is (out of blue, configured by other people). Use non-managed hosts in molecule.yml.
We OK to run it on the same host as the host we run our code. Shovel installation into 'prepare' stage.
We want it to be on separate server. Put additional host in platforms in a different group and configure it in prepare stage.
If you find your driver is not good enough, you always can opt for 'delegated' driver. In this case you need to write playbooks for create/destroy of hosts. It's relatively easy. The main trick is to use 'platforms' variable to get information about content of molecule.yaml's platform section.
I'm setting up a ansible server and I have a basic question.
What is the best practice regarding setting up the first ansible server itself ? (Installing specific version's python, ansible, etc.)
Ansible server is used to setup other non-ansible (and ansible servers),
but the first/root ansible server can't be helped by any ansible servers.
I'm writing a shell script just for the first one but I'm feeling I'm in early 2000.
You can get all the information you require to setup ansible at the below given links,
WATCH ANSIBLE QUICK START VIDEO
HOW ANSIBLE WORKS
DOWNLOAD ANSIBLE
I struggled with the same issue. I solved it in the following way:
Set up the first server manually (bear with me!) to a bare Ansible control server.
Create a second server with only the OS, no Ansible yet.
Write scripts on the first server to build up the second server to a fully specced Ansible control server. I did need to have an extra (shell)-script that installs the required galaxy roles. You can use Ansible to have those roles automatically installed on the second server.
On the second server, pull (you're Ansible scripts are in version control right?) the scripts and use them to keep the first server uptodate.
Switch regularly between using the first and second server as Ansible control server.
Yes, this does indeed add overhead (extra server, extra switching). But this way you make sure that when both servers die, you only need to have a first simple server with a bare Ansible and either build up itself or a second server.
I am currently building a little application that requires that some massively annoying software is installed and running in backround. To ease the pain of developing, I wrote a set of docker-compose files that runs the necessary daemons, creates some jobs, and throws in some test data.
Now, I'd like to run this in a CI-like manner. I currently have Jenkins check all the different repositories and execute a shell script that calles docker-compose up --abort-on-container-exit. That gets the job done, but it seems like a hack, and I'm not such a huge fan of Jenkins.
What I want to ask is: is there a more beautiful way of doing this? Specifically, is there a CI that will
watch a set of git repositories,
re-execute docker-compose (possibly multiple times with different sets of parameters), and
nicely collect and split the logs and tell me which container exactly failed how?
(Optionally) is not some cloud service but installable on my local server?
If the answer to this is "write a Jenkins module", then fine, so be it.
I'm aware that there are options like gitlab-ci, but I'd like to keep the CI script in a fashion that can also be easily executed during development, before pusing to a repo.
I have a Jenkins server that I want to deploy some code to some servers. To pick the right servers, I would like the jenkins job to query chef for nodes with a particular role.
However, I am not sure if that is a good idea or an anti-pattern, and I am not sure how to go about it in practice.
The jenkins server is already listed as a non-admin client, so I am wondering if I can use the existing credentials for something or if I should create a jenkins admin and set up a knife.rb in Jenkins home.
You would probably want to use one of the Chef scripting libraries like chef-api (Ruby), PyChef (Python), or Jclouds (Java) rather than knife itself. Using Jenkins for deploys is a bit wonky as it isn't reeeeally meant for that, but you can make it work. Tools like Push Jobs, Fabric, and RunDeck are possibly better suited, and all have direct integration with Chef's node catalog like you describe.
I have recently started using ansible for configuration management of linux servers.
My habbit is that if I learn one tool then I try to use it as much as possible.
Initially for my php web apps I had a long Makefile which used to download, install packages , make php.ini file chnages , extract zip files , copy files between folders etc to deploy my application in as automated way.
Now, I am thinking of converting that Makefile deployment to Ansible because then I can arrange the separate yml file for separate areas rather than one big makefile for the whole project.
I want to know that is it good idea to use ansible for that or Makefile will be good for that.
Sure, Ansible is great for that. You can separate all your different steps into different playbooks that are identified by yaml files.
You can define common tasks and then include them in your specific playbooks.
You can also make use of Ansible roles to create complete set of playbooks depending on the role of the server. For example, one set servers' role could be webservers and another set of servers' role could be databases.
You can find more info on roles here: http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_roles.html
There are's also a few modules on the web out there that you can also use to get you started and you can also use Ansible Galaxy to import roles.
Of course, you can accomplish the same by breaking down your Makefile but maybe you want to learn a new tool.
Hope it helps.