ansible-skel

This is my Ansible skeleton. It provide a nice structure to work comfortably with Ansible. You don't need to follow all principes of this structure to use Ansible.

Goal and features

The goal of this template is to provide a quick way to start with Ansible. It is a mix of best practices gathered around the web and the result of my own experience. You will find here an extremely modular structure, which should not let the user doubt where to put the correct files. Some advanced topics are covered into the docs folder

Basically, this structure provides:

• A nice default ansible.cfg file
• A way to organise hosts and groups
• An efficient way to organise variables, depending hosts, groups or environments
• It helps to avoid the recommended messy structure
• Most of files are grouped under directories to avoid confusion
• Provide a nice subset of plugins
• Provide default playbooks to really start quickly your development
• Most of file are shortly documented, with a description of most common patterns

So, just clone this repo, and start to dev :-)

Quick Start

To help you to start quickly, there are few entrey point to have your first playbook working. First, you need to add the targets you want to manage:

vim inventory/default.ini

Then add your target hosts under the [targets] section. If you feel lost, checkout the examples inside the file. Once you have done that, you can run the first playbook, which will ensure you have all required roles. If you don't have them, it will download them from Ansible Galaxy or from a git repo depending the source. It will install them into roles/vendors.

ansible-playbook playbooks/0_local_requirements.yaml

Once you get there, you are sure you have all requirements to play with Ansible. Then, we will ensure your inventory is correct by trying to connect on all hosts. Obviously, this playbook will not modify at this stage your targets, it's just to be sure your inventory is ok.

ansible-playbook playbooks/1_target_test.yml

If it run without errors, you can start to develop you own playbooks and roles. Enjoy!

File structure

The files structure is organised this way:

.
├── LICENSE
├── README.md                             # Documentation entry point
├── ansible.cfg -> config/ansible.cfg     # Symlink to vagrant config
├── config                              # Configuration directory
│   ├── ansible.cfg                       # Ansible configuration
│   ├── ssh_config                        # SSH configuration
│   ├── tmp                               # Temporary files
│   └── vault_password                    # Default vault file
├── docs                                # Advanced documentation topics
│   ├── skel-start.md
│   └── skel-tips.md
├── group_vars                          # Group vars directory
│   ├── all.yml                           # Common variables to all hosts
│   ├── dev.yml                           # Dev env variables
│   ├── preprod.yml                       # Preprod env variables
│   └── prod.yml                          # Production env variables
├── host_vars                           # Host vars directory
├── inventory                           # Inventory directory
│   ├── default.ini -> dev.ini            # Default inventory to use
│   ├── dev.ini                           # Dev inventory
│   ├── preprod.ini                       # Preprod inventary
│   └── prod.ini                          # Production inventory
├── playbooks                           # Playbook directory
│   ├── 0_local_requirements.yaml         # Configure local system
│   ├── 1_target_test.yml                 # Test targets
│   ├── 2_target_requirements.yml         # Basic configuration of targets
│   └── 3_target_sysadmin.yml             # Advanced confivuration of targets
├── plugins                             # Plugin directory
│   ├── action                            # Action plugins
│   ├── callback                          # Callback plugins
│   ├── connection                        # Connection plugins
│   ├── filter                            # Filter plugins
│   ├── lookup                            # Lookup plugins
│   ├── modules                           # Modules plugins
│   └── vars                              # Vars plugins
└── roles                               # Roles directory
    ├── local                             # Locale roles
    ├── profiles                          # Profile roles
    ├── requirements.yml                  # Vendor roles list
    └── vendors                           # Vendor roles

Compatibility

This skeleton will mainly work with Ansible 2.2. It could run on lower versions, but it has not been tested. Definitely not compatible with 1.x branch. Please checkout the correct branch of this repo to get the matching version.

As this skeleton comes with some python plugins, you may need to install extra Python dependencies if you want to use them:

• string_utils: slugify
• ipaddr: netaddr

Usually, a simple pip install slugify netaddr should let use those plugins. At this stage, documentation for the plugins is pretty poor, and you may need to read the source code if you want to understand how to use them.

Releases

• 0.5 - 26/01/2017
  • Compatibility for Ansible-2.2
  • Make some clean, stabilise the code
  • Update the documentation documentation

License

Please read GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

Credits

There are a lot of goood ideas taken from the enginyoyen ansible best practice repository. The rest comes from some colleagues (Hi Simon !) and my customer experience.