Ansible for DevOps

Foreword

Preface

1. Second Edition
2. Who is this book for?
3. Typographic conventions
4. Please help improve this book!
5. Current Published Book Version Information
6. About the Author

Introduction

1. In the beginning, there were sysadmins
2. Modern infrastructure management
3. Ansible and Red Hat
4. Ansible Examples
5. Other resources

Chapter 1 - Getting Started with Ansible

1. Ansible and Infrastructure Management
2. On snowflakes and shell scripts
3. Configuration management
4. Installing Ansible
5. Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6. Debian/Ubuntu
7. Creating a basic inventory file
8. Running your first Ad-Hoc Ansible command
9. Summary

Chapter 2 - Local Infrastructure Development: Ansible and Vagrant

1. Prototyping and testing with local virtual machines
2. Your first local server: Setting up Vagrant
3. Using Ansible with Vagrant
4. Your first Ansible playbook
5. Cleaning Up
6. Summary

Chapter 3 - Ad-Hoc Commands

1. Conducting an orchestra
2. Build infrastructure with Vagrant for testing
3. Inventory file for multiple servers
4. Your first ad-hoc commands
5. Discover Ansible’s parallel nature
6. Learning about your environment
7. Make changes using Ansible modules
8. Configure groups of servers, or individual servers
9. Configure the Application servers
10. Configure the Database servers
11. Make changes to just one server
12. Manage users and groups
13. Manage packages
14. Manage files and directories
15. Get information about a file
16. Copy a file to the servers
17. Retrieve a file from the servers
18. Create directories and files
19. Delete directories and files
20. Run operations in the background
21. Update servers asynchronously with asynchronous jobs
22. Check log files
23. Manage cron jobs
24. Deploy a version-controlled application
25. Ansible’s SSH connection history
26. Paramiko
27. OpenSSH (default)
28. Faster OpenSSH with Pipelining
29. Summary

Chapter 4 - Ansible Playbooks

1. Power plays
2. Running Playbooks with ansible-playbook
3. Limiting playbooks to particular hosts and groups
4. Setting user and sudo options with ansible-playbook
5. Other options for ansible-playbook
6. Real-world playbook: Rocky Linux Node.js app server
7. Add extra repositories
8. Deploy a Node.js app
9. Launch a Node.js app
10. Node.js app server summary
11. Real-world playbook: Ubuntu LAMP server with Drupal
12. Include a variables file, and discover pre_tasks and handlers
13. Basic LAMP server setup
14. Configure Apache
15. Configure PHP with lineinfile
16. Configure MySQL
17. Install Composer
18. Create a Drupal project with Composer
19. Install Drupal with Drush
20. Drupal LAMP server summary
21. Real-world playbook: Ubuntu server with Solr
22. Include a variables file, and more pre_tasks
23. Install Java
24. Install Apache Solr
25. Apache Solr server summary
26. Summary

Chapter 5 - Ansible Playbooks - Beyond the Basics

1. Handlers
2. Environment variables
3. Per-task environment variables
4. Variables
5. Playbook Variables
6. Inventory variables
7. Registered Variables
8. Accessing Variables
9. Host and Group variables
10. Automatically-loaded group_vars and host_vars
11. Magic variables with host and group variables and information
12. Facts (Variables derived from system information)
13. Local Facts (Facts.d)
14. Ansible Vault - Keeping secrets secret
15. Variable Precedence
16. If/then/when - Conditionals
17. Jinja Expressions, Python built-ins, and Logic
18. register
19. when
20. changed_when and failed_when
21. ignore_errors
22. Delegation, Local Actions, and Pauses
23. Pausing playbook execution with wait_for
24. Running an entire playbook locally
25. Prompts
26. Tags
27. Blocks
28. Summary

Chapter 6 - Playbook Organization - Roles, Includes, and Imports

1. Imports
2. Includes
3. Dynamic includes
4. Handler imports and includes
5. Playbook imports
6. Complete includes example
7. Roles
8. Role scaffolding
9. Building your first role
10. More flexibility with role vars and defaults
11. Other role parts: handlers, files, and templates
12. Handlers
13. Files and Templates
14. Organizing more complex and cross-platform roles
15. Ansible Galaxy
16. Getting roles from Galaxy
17. Using role requirements files to manage dependencies
18. A LAMP server in nine lines of YAML
19. A Solr server in seven lines of YAML
20. Helpful Galaxy commands
21. Contributing to Ansible Galaxy
22. Summary

Chapter 7 - Ansible Plugins and Content Collections

1. Creating our first Ansible Plugin — A Jinja Filter
2. The history of Ansible Content Collections
3. The Anatomy of a Collection
4. Putting our Plugin into a Collection
5. Going deeper developing collections
6. Collections on Automation Hub and Ansible Galaxy
7. Collection version constraints
8. Where are collections installed?
9. Summary

Chapter 8 - Inventories

1. A real-world web application server inventory
2. Non-prod environments, separate inventory files
3. Inventory variables
4. host_vars
5. group_vars
6. Ephemeral infrastructure: Dynamic inventory
7. Dynamic inventory with DigitalOcean
8. DigitalOcean account prerequisites
9. Connecting to your DigitalOcean account
10. Creating a droplet with Ansible
11. DigitalOcean dynamic inventory with digital_ocean.py
12. Dynamic inventory with AWS
13. Inventory on-the-fly: add_host and group_by
14. Multiple inventory sources - mixing static and dynamic inventories
15. Creating custom dynamic inventories
16. Building a Custom Dynamic Inventory in Python
17. Building a Custom Dynamic Inventory in PHP
18. Managing a PaaS with a Custom Dynamic Inventory
19. Summary

Chapter 9 - Ansible Cookbooks

1. Highly-Available Infrastructure with Ansible
2. Directory Structure
3. Individual Server Playbooks
4. Main Playbook for Configuring All Servers
5. Getting the required roles
6. Vagrantfile for Local Infrastructure via VirtualBox
7. Provisioner Configuration: DigitalOcean
8. Provisioner Configuration: Amazon Web Services (EC2)
9. AWS EC2 Dynamic inventory plugin
10. Summary
11. ELK Logging with Ansible
12. ELK Playbook
13. Forwarding Logs from Other Servers
14. Summary
15. GlusterFS Distributed File System Configuration with Ansible
16. Configuring Gluster - Basic Overview
17. Configuring Gluster with Ansible
18. Summary
19. Mac Provisioning with Ansible and Homebrew
20. Running Ansible playbooks locally
21. Automating Homebrew package and app management
22. Configuring macOS through dotfiles
23. Summary

Chapter 10 - Deployments with Ansible

1. Deployment strategies
2. Simple single-server deployments
3. Provisioning a Ruby on Rails server
4. Deploying a Rails app to the server
5. Provisioning and Deploying the Rails App
6. Deploying application updates
7. Zero-downtime multi-server deployments
8. Ensuring zero downtime with serial and integration tests
9. Deploying to app servers behind a load balancer
10. Capistrano-style and blue-green deployments
11. Additional Deployment Features
12. Summary

Chapter 11 - Server Security and Ansible

1. A brief history of SSH and remote access
2. Telnet
3. rlogin, rsh and rcp
4. SSH
5. The evolution of SSH and the future of remote access
6. Use secure and encrypted communication
7. Disable root login and use sudo
8. Remove unused software, open only required ports
9. Use the principle of least privilege
10. User account configuration
11. File permissions
12. Update the OS and installed software
13. Automating updates
14. Automating updates for RHEL systems
15. Automating updates for Debian-based systems
16. Use a properly-configured firewall
17. Configuring a firewall with ufw on Debian or Ubuntu
18. Configuring a firewall with firewalld on Fedora, RHEL and RHEL-derivatives
19. Make sure log files are populated and rotated
20. Monitor logins and block suspect IP addresses
21. Use SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) or AppArmor
22. Summary and further reading

Chapter 12 - Automating Your Automation with Ansible Tower and CI/CD

1. Installing Ansible AWX
2. Using AWX
3. Uninstalling AWX
4. Other Tower Features of Note
5. Tower Alternatives
6. Jenkins CI
7. Build a local Jenkins server with Ansible
8. Create an Ansible playbook on the Jenkins server
9. Create a Jenkins job to run an Ansible Playbook
10. Summary

Chapter 13 - Testing and CI for Ansible Content

1. Unit, Integration, and Functional Testing
2. Debugging and Asserting
3. The debug module
4. The fail and assert modules
5. Linting YAML with yamllint
6. Performing a --syntax-check
7. Linting Ansible content with ansible-lint
8. Automated testing and development with Molecule
9. Testing a role with Molecule.
10. Testing a playbook with Molecule
11. Adjusting Molecule to use more flexible test containers
12. Verifying a playbook with Molecule
13. Adding lint configuration to Molecule
14. Molecule Summary
15. Running your playbook in check mode
16. Automated testing on GitHub using GitHub Actions
17. Automated testing in other CI environments
18. Real-world examples
19. Functional testing using serverspec or testinfra
20. Summary

Chapter 14 - Automating HTTPS and TLS Certificates

1. Generating Self-Signed Certificates with Ansible
2. Idempotent Nginx HTTPS playbook with a self-signed cert
3. Automating Let’s Encrypt with Ansible for free Certs
4. Use Galaxy roles to get things done faster
5. Create the playbook
6. Create a server and configure DNS
7. Point the playbook inventory at the server
8. Access your server over HTTPS!
9. Configuring Nginx to proxy HTTP traffic and serve it over HTTPS
10. Modify the Nginx configuration to proxy traffic
11. Summary

Chapter 15 - Docker and Ansible

1. A brief introduction to Docker containers
2. Using Ansible to build and manage containers
3. Building a Flask app with Ansible and Docker
4. Data storage container
5. Flask container
6. MySQL container
7. Ship it!
8. Building containers with Ansible from the outside
9. Build a Hubot Slack bot container with ansible_connection: docker
10. Hubot and Slack
11. Building a Docker container with Ansible
12. Building the hubot-slack role
13. Building and running the Hubot Slack bot container
14. Summary
15. Summary

Afterword

Appendix A - Using Ansible on Windows workstations

1. Method 1 - Use the Windows Subsystem for Linux
2. Installing Ansible inside WSL
3. Method 2 - When WSL is not an option
4. Prerequisites
5. Set up an Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine
6. Log into the Virtual Machine
7. Install Ansible
8. Summary

Appendix B - Ansible Best Practices and Conventions

1. Playbook Organization
2. Write comments and use name liberally
3. Include related variables and tasks
4. Use Roles to bundle logical groupings of configuration
5. Use role defaults and vars correctly
6. YAML Conventions and Best Practices
7. YAML for Ansible tasks
8. Three ways to format Ansible tasks
9. Shorthand/one-line (key=value)
10. Structured map/multi-line (key:value)
11. Folded scalars/multi-line (>)
12. Using | to format multiline variables
13. Using ansible-playbook
14. Use Ansible Tower
15. Install Galaxy dependencies local to your playbook
16. Discriminate wisely when choosing community dependencies
17. Specify --forks for playbooks running on > 5 servers
18. Use Ansible’s Configuration file
19. Summary