Diary of a SysAdmin

I want to show you how I lay out my yaml files for working with Ansible at scale with AWX. Let’s begin.

The mono repo

All my code lives in the config/ansible repo.

I think even for large firms, multiple repos is overkill. It’s almost exclusively the IT department writing roles.

Layout

• We have a simple playbook called server_setup, which
• has a single role called whoami which
• has two tasks to report the hostname and ip_address of a server.
• ansible.cfg is essential for AWX to know to expect roles in the /roles folder.

├── ansible.cfg
├── playbooks
│   └── server_setup.yaml
└── roles
    └── whoami
        └── tasks
            ├── hostname
            │   ├── main.yaml
            │   └── RedHat.yaml
            ├── ip_address
            │   ├── main.yaml
            │   └── RedHat.yaml
            └── main.yaml

Let’s look at these files, starting with ansible.cfg. The sole purpose here is to make the above layout work.

[defaults]
roles_path = /runner/project/roles:/etc/ansible/roles:/usr/share/ansible/roles

Moving on, we have our server_setup.yaml file, which lays the groundwork to call the whoami role.

---
- name: Include whoami tasks
  hosts: all
  roles:
    - whoami

Inside whoami, we start to get into the thick of it. Everything essential is in a folder called tasks. The entry point is /roles/whoami/tasks/main.yaml which specifies our two actual tasks for showing the host’s hostname or IP:

---
- include_tasks: hostname/main.yaml
  when: echo_hostname | lower == 'yes'

- include_tasks: ip_address/main.yaml
  when: echo_ip_address | lower == 'yes'

As you can see on lines 2 and 5, we specify yet another entry point to printing the hostname or IP. The reason is because we want to support a good layout if we have multiple OSes in the environment. Anyways, here’s roles/whoami/tasks/hostname/main.yaml:

---
- name: Echo server hostname
  ansible.builtin.include_tasks: "{{ item }}"
  with_first_found:
    - "{{ ansible_os_family }}.yaml"
  

We use ansible_os_family to choose a file like RedHat.yaml where the actual logic happens! Here is roles/whoami/tasks/hostname/RedHat.yaml:

---
- name: Echo hostname
  debug:
    msg: "Hello World! I am {{ ansible_hostname }}."

AWX GUI – fetching the code

I have a Project called config-ansible (dev) which gets from my dev branch in the config/ansible repo:

I also have a Template called Server Setup:

This has a survey (handled by when: echo_hostname | lower == 'yes' in my main.yaml file for the tasks) to allow environment variables to be passed down:

We can now run the Server Setup playbook by running the template:

We see successful output from the job after launch:

Even better… why not use a collection?