Our proud SaaS cloud development environment runcode.io
Back to Blog List
Server Management

Ansible Galaxy Introduction

2022-07-21

Ansible Galaxy is the hub of ansible scripts contributed by users. To follow this article its important that you know about ansible. We have a simple, easy to follow blog about ansible scripting here(https://micropyramid.com/blog/how-to-deploy-django-with-uwsgi-and-nginx-using-ansible-play-book/).

Ansible Galaxy is the hub of ansible scripts contributed by users.

To follow this article its important that you know about ansible. We have a simple, easy to follow blog about ansible scripting here(https://micropyramid.com/blog/how-to-deploy-django-with-uwsgi-and-nginx-using-ansible-play-book/).

1. Create the skeleton of ansible script:

Run: ansible-galaxy init my_playbook

This command creates the following structure:

my_playbook
    defaults/
    files/
    handlers/
    meta/
    tasks/
    templates/
    vars/
    README.md

defaults: You can declare default configurations or variables.

handlers: Similar to tasks but get invoked by a notifier. Eg: if a task has changed some settings then it will notify this handler to restart a service.

meta: This file contains information about dependencies the current task has to resolve first, author info etc..

tasks: It contains the core logic.

templates: These are jinja2 templates which are simple configuration files.

vars: Contains all the local variables

2. Writing a basic ansible task.

Lets install mysql over Ubuntu server.

First we need to provide password to install mysql. So you can provide password through defaults file or vars file.

In vars/main.yml

---

# vars file for mysql_server

mysql_server_password:  mysql_server_password

Now create a task which sets password and installs mysql.

In tasks/main.yml:

---
# tasks file for mysql_server

- name: Setting MySQL root password before installing
  debconf: "name='mysql-server' question='mysql-server/root_password' value='{{mysql_server_password | quote}}' vtype='password'"

- name: Confirm MySQL root password before installing
  debconf: "name='mysql-server' question='mysql-server/root_password_again' value='{{mysql_server_password | quote}}' vtype='password'"

- name: Install MySQL
  apt: "package='{{ item }}' state=present force=yes"
  when: ansible_os_family == 'Debian'
  with_items:
    - mysql-server
    - libmysqlclient-dev

3. Create a yml file including above task and required configurations.

In test.yml (this file should be in the path of my_playbook directory)

---
- hosts: my_server
  remote_user: root
  roles:
    - { role: my_playbook }

Run: ansible-playbook test.yml

MySQL server will be installed over server.

4. Sharing the above task.

  • Push the code to github
  • Create an account at ansible galaxy
  • Aadd your role

From now on you can simply use "ansible-galaxy pull your_role_name" to access your role.