Ansible roles - building a small Apache role

Lets’ use an Ansible role to deploy Apache with a single static page on multiple environments: Dev and Prod.

For these exercises, checkout the role branch from our repository:

# stash our current changes
# changes may be retrieve using git stash pop
git stash

# checkout role branch
git checkout role 

This branch has a very simple playbook referencing the apache role. The role can be found under roles/apache and define tasks to install Apache with a simple index.html template with a few variables.

Explore role structure

Explore the files unders roles/apache and:

• Find where the role’s tasks are defined
• Find where the role’s default variables are defined
• Find in Ansible documentation’s the recommended role layout and goal of each folder’s in a role

Try to run the playbook with our defined role.

• What value of the apache_hello_message variable was used?

Define multiple inventories and configuration

We now want to define multiple environments, each Ansible inventory representing a different environment:

• dev environment showing message Hello from Dev!
• prod environment showing message Hello from Prod!
• Some overrides in Prod environments

Using Ansible inventories:

• Copy inventories/dev to inventories/prod
• Configure each inventory to use a single host by adding a 2 to your original host, for example:

  pierre1.training.crafteo.io
  pierre2.training.crafteo.io
  

• Configure your inventories to ensure index.html shows message:
  • Hello from Dev! with dev inventory
  • Hello from Prod! with prod inventory
• Permissions of the index.html
  • In Dev, we want to have permissions 0774 on index.html
  • In Prod, we want to keep role’s default permissions for index.html
  • Note: this may require some changes in role

Run your playbook and check changes were applied. Reminder: use -i INVENTORY to specify inventory to use, for example:

# use dev inventory
ansible-playbook -i inventories/dev playbook.yml