Ansible Labs

This repo contains a set of Ansible labs that act as an intro to the breadth of capabilities that Ansible has in the IT automation world. The labs will also be themed around general DevOps style work.

Automation

This repo contains basic github actions that perform static linting on commit pushes. These are not covered in the labs but are present for additional learning material related to DevOps pipelines.

What's this? It's a badge that shows the status of various pipeline activities 'at a glance' and are common in many projects.

Requirements

• docker a containerization tool
• docker-compose a wrapper for docker that provides additional tooling for defining containers via yaml configs

Note: refer to requirements.txt for explicit dependencies if you'd like to set up the labs outside of a containerized environment. (this is discouraged)

• Understanding of yaml which is whitespace sensitive

How to interact with these labs

These labs can be worked on in a containerized environment (sandboxed) so that you don't have to install additional dependencies. You just need docker + docker-compose!

A devcontainer configuration is also supplied so that you can do container-native development with vscode if you wish via remote-containers

Clone the code to your local machine in order to work with it

git clone git@github.com:jon-funk/ansible-labs.git

Note: this clone command will create the directory ansible-labs/ with its contents for you

Start the ansible container and connect to it through a bash shell

docker-compose up -d ansible && docker-compose exec ansible bash

Note: this will build the ansible image the first time you run it

How do I leave the lab?

exit will kill the bash shell and exit the container (but the container is still running)

docker-compose down will spin down the ansible container

Note: although down will work anywhere, other docker-compose commands require you to be in the same directory as the docker-compose.yaml file so that it understands the container definitions

Note: if you don't take down the container it will keep running until you restart

Environment Variables

passing environment variables is supported in the ansible container defition via creation of a .env file

Note: Following best-practices, these .env files are NOT version controlled and must be created by the individual