Trialing Ansible AWX

The upstream for Ansible Tower, awx project, is in development and worth checking out. It's pretty painless to get up and running in a testing environment for trial purposes. You'll need a system running Docker, Ansible, and a Python dependency, docker-py. There are quite a few ways to set this up, I'll go over one way using Vagrant and Virtualbox to spin up an Ubuntu 16.04 machine and walk through installation and some basic usage. If you already have a linux machine ready, skip the Vagrant lab setup and go straight to Installation.

I've been using Chef for a few years now and Ansible for about half that time; I really like how the two compliment each other. Chef works great for tasks that run constantly, like adding users and default packages to a newly bootstrapped vm. I've found that Ansible will do just about everything Chef can do and found one case in which Ansible excels. While orchestrating a docker swarm cluster, I tried tackling the challenge first in Chef. When initializing the swarm, the master node creates a unique key that needs to be applied to each of the other nodes to bring them into the swarm. With Chef, there wasn't an immediate way available for handling this problem without the use of DinamoDB. Where as in Ansible, I was able to save this value to a variable and push it to every node.

So far, I have just been running all of my Ansible playbooks from my laptop. The day has come that I need to centralize all of this config management somewhere my collogues can see it and join the Ansible party. I cannot afford to pay for Tower, so I've decided to see what AWX can do for me.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Vagrant
• Installation
  • Ansible
  • Docker
  • Pip
  • AWX
    • Example

Requirements

• Vagrant
• Virtualbox
• clone ansible/awx
• install docker
• install ansible 2.4+

Vagrant

Spin up a couple of virtualbox vms to create a lab environment to test out Ansible AWX. One node to host Ansible AWX and one to play the role of a lab host. If you would like to follow along you can find all of the examples on github.

First, check to see what boxes you have available, then initialize a new Vagrant file running Ubuntu 16.04.

vagrant box list                                                                                           

bento/centos-6.8    (virtualbox, 2.3.1)
bento/centos-7.2    (virtualbox, 2.3.1)
bento/debian-7.8    (virtualbox, 2.2.1)
bento/ubuntu-14.04  (virtualbox, 2.3.1)
bento/ubuntu-16.04  (virtualbox, 2.3.7)
jhcook/macos-sierra (virtualbox, 10.12.6)
kennyl/pfsense      (virtualbox, 2.4.0)

vagrant init bento/ubuntu-16.04

A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

Update this newly created Vagrantfile before bringing up the new machines by adding a few things:

• More RAM
• Bring up a second vm to test against
• Configure hostnames and private IPs
• Run apt-get update

Vagrantfile

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|
  config.vm.box = 'bento/ubuntu-16.04'
  config.vm.provider 'virtualbox' do |vb|
    vb.gui = false
    vb.memory = '4096'
  end
  config.vm.provision 'shell', inline: 'apt-get update'
  {
    'ansible-awx'   => '192.168.33.11',
    'ansible-lab'   => '192.168.33.12'
  }.each do |short_name, ip|
    config.vm.define short_name do |host|
      host.vm.network 'private_network', ip: ip
      host.vm.hostname = "#{short_name}.dev"
    end
  end
end

Bring up the 2 newly configured vms

vagrant up
...
...

Check status when they're finished

vagrant status
Current machine states:

ansible-awx               running (virtualbox)
ansible-lab               running (virtualbox)

Ssh to a box

vagrant ssh ansible-awx

You can also open virtualbox and see your newly created vms through the gui and access a console that way.

Installation

With a fresh installation of Ubuntu install any requirements found on the AWX install page for docker-compose. At the time of this writing it includes Ansible 2.4+, so we'll need a repo to get that. I'll ssh into the Vagrant box to go over the installation steps.

Ansible

Install the latest release via apt ubuntu

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ansible

If I have Ansible already installed on my workstation I can handle the above with an Ansible playbook to provision the new vms. First I'll create an inventory.ini file to point Ansible at my virtual machines. NOTE: the default creds for vagrant are used here for simplicity. These creds are for a lab environment and not expected to be used in production.

inventory.ini

[vagrant]
ansible-awx ansible_host=192.168.33.11
ansible-lab ansible_host=192.168.33.12

[vagrant:vars]
ansible_connection=ssh
ansible_ssh_user=vagrant
ansible_ssh_pass=vagrant

With the inventory.ini file in place I can now point Ansible at my new vms

ansible -i inventory.ini all -m ping

ansible-awx | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
ansible-lab | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

Then write a file to handle the above installation of Ansible

install_ansible.yml

---
- hosts: all
  become: true
  become_method: sudo
  tasks:

  - name: add ansible ppa
    apt_repository:
      repo: 'ppa:ansible/ansible'

  - name: apt-get update && install ansible
    apt:
      update_cache: yes
      name: ansible
      state: present

Finally, run the playbook against the box

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -l ansible-awx install_ansible.yml
...
...
ansible-awx                : ok=3    changed=2    unreachable=0    failed=0

Verify the version of Ansible running on ansible-awx. Hopefully, it is 2.4 or higher.

ansible -i inventory.ini ansible-awx -a 'ansible --version'

ansible-awx | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
ansible 2.4.3.0
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = [u'/home/vagrant/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
  python version = 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016, 06:48:10) [GCC 5.4.0 20160609]

Docker

Install the latest version of docker-engine to the ansible-awx vm.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
  apt-transport-https \
  ca-certificates \
  curl \
  software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88
sudo add-apt-repository \
  "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) \
  stable"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce

install_docker.yml

---
- hosts: all
  become: true
  tasks:

    - name: add docker engine repo key
      apt_key:
        keyserver: p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net
        id: 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D
        state: present

    - name: add docker engine repo
      apt_repository:
        repo: deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-xenial main
        state: present
        filename: docker
        update_cache: yes

    - name: install docker-engine
      apt:
        name: docker-engine
        state: present
        update_cache: yes

Install docker-engine on ansible-awx host

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -l ansible-awx install_docker.yml
...
...
ansible-awx                : ok=4    changed=3    unreachable=0    failed=0

Pip

Install pip and docker-py

sudo apt-get install python-pip

pip install docker-py

Tack this onto the tail end of docker_install.yml for now and run it again. It will skip the docker portions because they're already installed.

tail install_docker.yml

- name: install python-pip
  apt:
    name: python-pip
    state: present
    update_cache: yes

- name: install docker-py
  pip:
    name: docker-py

Run install_docker.yml again to install pip dependencies

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -l ansible-awx install_docker.yml
...
...
ansible-awx                : ok=6    changed=2    unreachable=0    failed=0

AWX

Clone ansible/awx and cd into the new folder.

git clone https://github.com/ansible/awx.git

cd awx

Run the install playbook.

cd installer

ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml

And to handle this with Ansible instead, here is an example playbook.

install_awx.yml

---
- hosts: all
  become: true
  become_method: sudo
  tasks:

  - name: Clone awx from github
    git:
      repo: https://github.com/ansible/awx.git
      dest: /opt/awx/
      version: devel

  - name: Check to see if AWX is running on port 80 and returns a status 200
    ignore_errors: true
    uri:
      url: http://localhost:80
    register: localhost

  - name: output status code
    debug:
      var: localhost.status

  - name: Install and run AWX if it's not already running on port 80
    command: ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml
    args:
      chdir: /opt/awx/installer/
    when:
      - localhost is defined
      - localhost.status != 200

Run it to install and start up AWX on the ansible-awx host.

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -l ansible-awx install_awx.yml                                
...
...
ansible-awx                : ok=4    changed=2    unreachable=0    failed=0

Browse to 192.168.33.11:80 to checkout it out!

Use the default creds to log in for the first time.

• admin
• password

A brand new installation of AWX :-)

Example

Start by clicking on Credentials to ADD a vagrant user and password for the lab boxes. By default the vagrant user has a password of vagrant. From the 'Credential Type' drop down chose Machine

If you want to use an ssh key from a vagrant box you can find it here.

cat .vagrant/machines/ansible-awx/virtualbox/private_key

Click on Inventory and ADD a new one to add the two virtualbox vms to it.

• Create a vagrant inventory and click save.
• Add the vagrant hosts to the vagrant inventory

Create a new project and name it ansible-awx

• name: ansible-awx
• SCM type: Git
• SCM url: https://github.com/jahrik/ansible-awx.git

Save it and click on the little cloudy, down-arrow button to "Start and SCM update"

Create a playbook.yml file that encompasses the 3 things we did above:

• Install Ansible
• Install Docker
• Install and run Ansible AWX

playbook.yml

---
- import_playbook: install_ansible.yml
- import_playbook: install_docker.yml
- import_playbook: install_awx.yml

With that, we can create a 'Job Template' in AWX that will run this playbook against whatever node we point it at. Here's what that will look like.

• name: ansible-awx
• job type: Run
• inventory: vagrant
• project: ansible-awx
• playbook: playbook.yml
• credentials: vagrant

Now, fire it off at both nodes to install Ansible AWX on ansible-awx and ansible-lab. The ansible-awx host will be ignored because it's already configured, but the ansible-lab box will install everything at once and bring up AWX from start to finish with one playbook and the push of a button.

Navigate to Portal Mode and push the little rocket ship button for the ansible-awx project to kick it off. Over to the right you will see it start up and can click on the ansible-awx link to follow along as the job runs.

You can see from the output that it is leaving the ansible-awx node alone and installing new on the ansible-lab node.

And just like that, there is another fresh instance of AWX installed on the ansible-lab node at 192.168.33.12:80