README.md

Ansible

🔔 Already created playbooks in this starter project are prepared for Enterwell's needs. Please adapt them to your hosts and requirements or delete them in general

⚡ Run automation

ansible-playbook -i <inventory_file_path> -e <extra_vars> <playbook_path>

📚 Useful links

• Ansible documentation

Example

ansible-playbook -i /var/www/wp-starter/.ansible/inventory/hosts.yml -e "ansible_user=ec2-user mysql_user=wordpress" /var/www/wp-starter/.ansible/tasks/stage.playbook.yml

🔔 You would usually run this command in a CI/CD pipeline, before copying your code to wanted environment. Github Actions and Azure Pipelines already have Ansible installed on their agents and no pre-installment is needed.

📖 Table of contents

• ⚡ Run automation
• 🔨 Requirements
• 📘 About
• 🏛 Folder structure
• 🧑‍💼 Ansible in use

🔨 Requirements

• Ansible Control Node
  • a machine on which ansible is run, a Linux distribution of sort - usually a CI/CD agent
• Ansible host(s)
  • machines on which playbook tasks are run
• Ansible package
  • installed on the Ansible control node

📘 About

Ansible is an open source tool used to automate tasks, at least in our case. In this starter project, we use it to prepare or local, stage, production or any other environment so that we can deploy our code to expected and tested environments. Also, if we migrate or want to deploy the code to other environments, we can easily do so.

🏛 Folder structure

.ansible/
├─ files/
├─ inventory/
│  ├─ hosts.yml
├─ tasks/
│  ├─ prod.playbook.yml
│  ├─ stage.playbook.yml
│  ├─ ...
├─ vars/
│  ├─ default.yml
│  ├─ production.yml
│  ├─ stage.yml
│  ├─ ...
├─ README.md

Folder	File	Description
files		Files that we use as a template for files that need to be created on the hosts. We either copy these files AS IS or we use them as a template (Jinja2-j2 templates)
inventory		Where we put the Ansible inventory files
	hosts.yml	Inventory hosts file with list of our hosts on which automated tasks are run
tasks		Where we put the Ansible playbook files
	stage.playbook.yml	Playbook file with task that are run on stage host. We create these as much as we need and same ones can be reused on more hosts. How we write them can be seen here
vars		Where we put files with Ansible variables
	default.yml	Ansible variables that are common for all hosts. Usually general project information like PHP and node version etc.
	stage.yml	Ansible variables specific for stage host. Important!: sensitive information should not be written here directly, but provided and overridden through -e flag when calling ansible-playbook command
README.md		That's me 😉

🔔 You are of course welcome to organize this in any way that suits your needs

🧑‍💼 Ansible in use

A simple use-case is explained here:

• project is ready for deployment (to any environment)
• edit hosts.yml inventory file and add your host information

  • ⚠ Don't write sensitive host information like credentials here, only general ones

• edit default.yml variables with general project information
• create or edit .yml file for your host with variables for that host

  • ⚠ Don't write sensitive information like credentials here, only general ones

• create or edit .yml playbook with needed tasks
• run ansible-playbook command

  • ⚠ Your should provide the sensitive variables here with -e flag