Too lazy to set up

Have you ever wanted to start working with ansible without being bothered to set it up properly ? You might just have a main.yml file in your folder as your main playbook but you are hit with all sorts of warning and .retry files while debugging your code. You then later come back to configure all the small little things like the ansible.cfg, all the required folders like group_vars, templates, roles etc.

I know this happens to me so, as a good Ansible addict as myself, it feels appropriate to start my blog with this first ansible post to detail how I set up a quick and easy way to set up new Ansible projects…..using bash.

One things that I’ve learned is to never underestimate the power of bash, even if Ansible is a very good Configuration Management tool. For that reason, I’ve use this simple bash script to help me build new ansible projects whenever I need it, it could be :

  • experimenting new modules
  • debugging some tasks coming from another huge playbook
  • testing new roles
  • etc

Setting up the bootstrapping script

You can see the full content of my code by clicking here gitlab/pasc-tech/ansible-bootstrap.

To get started, you’ll have to prepare the directory where you’ll keep the bash script.

Example :

cd /opt
git clone https://gitlab.com/pasc-tech-tools/ansible-bootstrap.git
chmod 744 ansible-bootstrap/ansible-bootstrap.sh

Create an alias to set up your ansible-bootstrap command. Point it to where the script has been downloaded. Example :

cat << EOF >> ~/.zshrc
alias ansible-bootstrap="/opt/ansible-bootstrap/ansible-bootstrap.sh"
EOF

source ~/.zshrc

All done

That’s it ! Whenever you need to start a new project now, all you need to do is run anible-bootstrap command, like so :

mkdir ~/workspace && cd ~/workspace
ansible-bootstrap

The script should set up your ansible project on your control machine like this :

tree
.
├── ansible.cfg
├── group_vars
│   └── all.yml
├── inventory.hosts
├── main.yml
├── roles
└── templates

I’ve also added some options for the type of connection, which could be local or not. I might add something for windows or docker as well later.

ansible-bootstrap -l | --local | local

For now, that was enough to get started quickly.

Of course, feel free to modify yours to suits your need and let me know how it goes.

Conclusion

Having an ansible-boostrap command has help me set up a quick ansible structure to get started on testing new modules or getting my head around complex dictionary loops without being bothered on the rest of the playbook. Using the --local is useful to set the playbook to talk to the local interface and not establish an ssh connection locally.