Provisioning w/ Ansible

ansible-provisioning-getting-started.md

Provisioning (Ansible)

A getting started guide.

Prerequisites

Given that you have set up a new instance and the instance is up and running. Python 2 should be already installed on OS X.

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• ansible brew install ansible
• ssh-copy-id brew install ssh-copy-id

Set environment variables

Do the following on your local machine.

The instance's IP address.

export HOST=your.host.ip.here

Let's call the provision user deployer. Feel free to change.

export PROVUSER=deployer

Preppin'

Add user to host machine

Add user with home dir and bash as shell.

ssh root@$HOST useradd -m -s /bin/bash $PROVUSER

Give her a password.

ssh root@$HOST passwd $PROVUSER

Create an SSH key

Defaults are expected. Pick a passphrase, don't leave it empty.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Start agent.

ssh-agent bash

Add your identity.

ssh-add

Copy key to host

On your local machine.

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub $PROVUSER@$HOST

Ensure that keys match. The command returns 0 on success.

diff -u  <(ssh $PROVUSER@$HOST cat /home/$PROVUSER/.ssh/authorized_keys) ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > /dev/null; echo $?

If you get a non-zero value; ssh to host and and compare host's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys with your public key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on your local machine. (Or remove the redirection to /dev/null to see the diff.)

Ansible

Do the following steps in your project dir. You could place playbooks and other related files to a folder called $PROJECT_DIR/provisioning for instance.

Hosts file

This is where your hosts are defined. For example cat $PROJECT_DIR/provisioning/hosts shows:

[ec2]
1.1.1.1
1.1.1.2

[rds]
1.1.2.1

Ping 'em

ansible all -u $PROVUSER -m ping -i hosts

If you got a green light you're good to go. Otherwise run the command again with -vvvv flag and check what's up.

Contributing

Any additions are welcome. Just be short and descriptive. Keep it simple.

Authors

Juho Hautala