Ansible Lab - Zacham17/my-tech-journal GitHub Wiki

Brief Summary

In this lab, I installed Ansible on a linux workstation and used it to establish an SSH connection to a CentOS server and install nginx onto it.

Before using Ansible, you must generate an SSH key using the command, ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
You can copy the key to the remote systems by typing a command with the following syntax ssh-copy-id DOMAINUSER@FQDN_OF_REMOTESYSTEM
To install Ansible, run the command sudo apt install ansible
You can edit the contents of your Ansible inventory by editing the /etc/ansible/hosts file.
In the /etc/ansible/hosts file, I added the two CentOS7 servers I would be using Ansible to SSH onto.
After adding to the hosts file, you can test that ansible can connect to the remote systems by running the following command to ping the system, ansible all -m ping -u DOMAINUSER

Add the following to the /etc/ansible/hosts file:

ansible_become=yes  # use sudo 
ansible_become_method=sudo 
ansible_become_pass='{{ my_cluser_sudo_pass }}'

Use the following playbook file to install nginx, located here
Create an index.html file in the same directory and add some html code to it.
After downloading that file, you can use the command ansible-playbook -u DOMAINUSER --ask-become-pass PLAYBOOK_FILENAME to install nginx
On the remote system, start the nginx service using systemctl start nginx
You can now browse to the web page hosted on the server

The following is an example of a playbook file that does this

---
- name: Update Server
hosts: mailServer,webServer

tasks:
- name: Update CentOS7
- raw: yum update -y

Type the following command to execute the playbook file: ansible-playbook --ask-become-pass PLAYBOOK_FILENAME
This will update your remote systems
TIP: You can use --verbose with the command to see the background processes that the command runs.