Ansible III: Ansible Galaxy¶

create the directory¶

Setup your submission directory after you clone and rebased with https://github.com/cloudmesh/sp17-i524:

$ git rebase upstream/master
$ ./setup galaxy <your HID>

It will create a folder named after your HID inside directory galaxy/. Your Galaxy related assignments will be completed and submitted there. Go ahead and create files README.md, playbook.yml, inventory and a subdirectory roles/ then. playbook.yml is your project playbook. It should perform the Emacs installation task by executing the corresponding role you will develop in the folder ‘roles/’. The only difference is that we will construct the role with the help of ansible-galaxy this time.

Now, let ansible-galaxy initialize the directory structure for you:

$ cd roles
$ ansible-galaxy init <to-be-created-role-name>

The naming convention is to concatenate your name and the role name by a dot. Here is how it looks like:

fill in information¶

Let us fill in information to our project. There are several main.yml files in different folders, and we will illustrate their usages.

defaults and vars:

These folders should hold variables key-value pairs for your playbook scripts. We will leave them empty in this example.

files:

This folder is for files need to be copied to the target hosts. Data files or configuration files can be specified if needed. We will leave it empty too.

templates:

Similar missions to files/, templates is allocated for template files. Keep empty for a simple Emacs installation.

handlers:

This is reserved for services running on target hosts. For example, to restart a service under certain circumstance.

tasks:

This file is the actual script for all tasks. You can use the role you built previously for Emacs installation here:

---
- name: install Emacs on Ubuntu 16.04
  become: yes
  package: name=emacs state=present

meta:

Provide necessary metatdata for our Ansible Galaxy project for shipping:

---
galaxy_info:
  author: <you name>
  description: emacs installation on Ubuntu 16.04
  license:
    - MIT
  min_ansible_version: 2.0
  platforms:
    - name: Ubuntu
      versions:
        - xenial
  galaxy_tags:
    - development

dependencies: []

Test it out¶

You have your Ansible Galaxy role ready now. To test it as a user, go to your HID directory and edit the other two files inventory and playbook.yml, which are already generated for you in directory tests by the script:

$ ansible-playbook -i ./hosts playbook.yml

After running this playbook, you should have Emacs installed on localhost.