{"id":7361,"date":"2016-03-17T13:05:01","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T12:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/getting-started-with-ansible-preparations\/"},"modified":"2016-03-17T13:05:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T12:05:01","slug":"getting-started-with-ansible-preparations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/getting-started-with-ansible-preparations\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting started with Ansible – Preparations"},"content":{"rendered":"

When your infrastructure landscape becomes larger and larger you definitely need a tool which helps you in managing your servers, no matter if p\u1e27ysical or virtual, running in the cloud or not. One tool (many others are around) which assists you in provisioning, configuration management and mass deployment is Ansible<\/a>. If you look at the man page you can find this sentence: “Ansible is an extra-simple tool\/framework\/API for doing ‘remote things’ over SSH.”. What is better than learning by doing? Lets start:<\/p>\n

I have three CentOS 7.2<\/a> core installations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
hostname<\/th>\ndescription<\/th>\nip<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
ansible-control<\/td>\nThe ansible control host. All Ansible commands will be executed from here<\/td>\n192.168.22.170<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
ansible-pg1<\/td>\nThe first host that will be managed by Ansible<\/td>\n192.168.22.171<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
ansible-pg2<\/td>\nThe second host that will be managed by Ansible<\/td>\n192.168.22.172<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

All of these hosts are on the same CentOS release (although that does not really matter):<\/p>\n

\n[root@ansible-control~]$ cat \/etc\/centos-release\nCentOS Linux release 7.2.1511 (Core)\n<\/pre>\n
Obviously the first step is to get Ansible installed on the control host. There is nothing we need to install on the hosts we want to manage. Ansible does not require to setup any agents which is one of the main advantages over other tools. The only requirement is ssh. There are various ways to get Ansible installed but for the scope of this post we’ll go with yum as Ansible is available in the EPEL repository<\/a>. Lets add the repository:<\/p>\n
\n[root@ansible-control~]$ yum install -y https:\/\/dl.fedoraproject.org\/pub\/epel\/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm\n[root@ansible-control~]$ rpm -qa | grep epel\nepel-release-7-5.noarch\n<\/pre>\n
From there on installing Ansible is just a matter of using yum:<\/p>\n
\n[root@ansible-control~]$ yum install -y ansible\n<\/pre>\n
At the time of writing this will install version 1.9.4 of Ansible:<\/p>\n
\n[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ ansible --version\nansible 1.9.4\n  configured module search path = None\n<\/pre>\n
Yum will take care of all the dependencies (e.g. python) and setup everything for us. Before starting to work with Ansible (because we do not want to work with root) all three hosts get a group and a user created. So, for all hosts:<\/p>\n
\n[root@ansible-control~]$ groupadd ansible\n[root@ansible-control~]$ useradd -g ansible ansible\n[root@ansible-control~]$ passwd ansible \n[root@ansible-control~]$ su - ansible\n[ansible@ansible-control~]$ ssh-keygen -t rsa\n<\/pre>\n
The generation of the ssh keys is important as we’ll use password-less ssh authentication for talking from the control host to the managed hosts. To succeed with this we’ll need to copy the ssh ids from the control host to the managed hosts:<\/p>\n
\n[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ ssh-copy-id -i .ssh\/id_rsa.pub ansible@192.168.22.171\n[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ ssh-copy-id -i .ssh\/id_rsa.pub ansible@192.168.22.172\n<\/pre>\n
How does the control host know which hosts it shall manage if nothing gets installed on the clients? Quite easy: there is a configuration file in \/etc\/ansible. As we do want to work with our dedicated user we’ll change the permissions:<\/p>\n
\n[root@ansible-control~]$ chown -R ansible:ansible \/etc\/ansible\/*\n<\/pre>\n
Using the Ansible user we can now create our first hosts file:<\/p>\n
\n[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ cat \/etc\/ansible\/hosts\n[postgres-servers]\n192.168.22.171\n192.168.22.172\n<\/pre>\n
The name in brackets is a so called group name. This means be referencing “postgres-servers” in the Ansible commands Ansible resolves the group name to the server names listed for that group. Lets do a basic test to check if we can talk to our clients:<\/p>\n
\n[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ ansible postgres-servers -a \"\/bin\/echo 11\"\n192.168.22.171 | success | rc=0 >>\n11\n\n192.168.22.172 | success | rc=0 >>\n11\n<\/pre>\n
Cool, works. We can run the same command on both clients. If there are more clients you can tell Ansible to use N parallel forks to execute the commands by using the “-f” switch (5 is the default):<\/p>\n
\n[ansible@ansible-control ~]$ ansible postgres-servers -a \"\/bin\/echo 11\" -f 5\n192.168.22.171 | success | rc=0 >>\n11\n\n192.168.22.172 | success | rc=0 >>\n11\n<\/pre>\n
You might already guessed it from the naming of the clients that there will be something about PostgreSQL in this post. And, you’re right \ud83d\ude42 To outline one use case for Ansible we’ll setup PostgreSQL on two hosts in exactly the same way using Ansible in the next post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When your infrastructure landscape becomes larger and larger you definitely need a tool which helps you in managing your servers, no matter if p\u1e27ysical or virtual, running in the cloud or not. One tool (many others are around) which assists you in provisioning, configuration management and mass deployment is Ansible. If you look at the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","neve_meta_reading_time":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4133,42],"tags":[150,769,770],"class_list":["post-7361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-database","category-operating-systems","tag-ansible","tag-deployment","tag-provisioning"],"yoast_head":"\nGetting started with Ansible - Preparations - dbi services | Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/getting-started-with-ansible-preparations\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Getting started with Ansible - Preparations\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When your infrastructure landscape becomes larger and larger you definitely need a tool which helps you in managing your servers, no matter if p\u1e27ysical or virtual, running in the cloud or not. 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