However ansible is a great tool for IT infrastructure automation in certain cases it's hard to use it for the complete deployment, because of that tools like ansible-tower/AWX try to wrap it's activity making further assumptions on the way ansible code is stored (versioning repository), the way it's executed - certain combinations of inventory/playbook/tag options used to achieve specific goals. Having it in mind ansible-deployer may be treated as yet another ansible-playbook wrapper, but focused on comprehensive command line intrface and easy YAML based configuration.
- The results of whole excution are logged and saved together with the ansible code state for potential review in the future.
- Only one active ansible-deployer per ansible inventory is allowed, attempt to execute ansible-deployer on already locked infrastructure will be rejected.
- Working directory is setup per every execution of ansible-deployer separately to store the code state used. This is done by site configurable hook.
- It's possible to lock/unlock inventory (defined as --infra --stage pairs) for manual manipulation, stopping ansible-deployer from being used.
tasks.yaml- Configuration of tasks (sets of playbooks to be executed)infra.yaml- Configuration of infrastructures and stages of those mapping to ansible inventory
ansible-deployer run --task updateUsers --infra webServers --stage prod