Simple Vagrant Ansible Local Example
I recently worked on a project showing how to install and configure a complete Pentaho Server instance with a back-end data repository housed in Postgresql. I wanted to select a provisioner for this work that would be easy to use to deploy the server either as a single instance VM, as an Amazon AMI, or as a set of docker containers.
As I was setting up the first such target I wanted to support – a VirtualBox VM – I noticed that the examples and documentation for using Vagrant’s ansible-local provisioner were a bit sparse. Because of this, once I had my proof of concept working I decided to make a copy of the repository so I could share it with my adoring public. Well, with the public, anyway!
I’ve shared the code on Github. It’s pretty straightforward, but let’s walk through it briefly. The code consists of four files, which together launch a simple Centos VM with Nginx installed:
Vagrantfile - We’re using Vagrant to manage our VM.
playbook.yml - Our Ansible Playbook that will install Nginx for us on our Vagrant VM.
inventory - Ansible “inventory” lists are groups of target machines that Ansible will configure. Unlike tools like Chef and Puppet, which rely on having a client installed, Ansible can configure remote machines listed in its inventory over SSH. Since we’re only configuring a single VM, our inventory file is quite simple and simply contains the same IP address we configure in our VagantFile.
index.html - A test file for Nginx to serve.
The Vagrantfile is only a few lines:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080
config.vm.box = "centos/7"
config.vm.network 'private_network', ip: '192.168.56.10'
config.vm.provision :ansible_local do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
ansible.inventory_path = 'inventory'
ansible.limit = 'all'
end
This example assumes Vagrant and Virtualbox are installed. We configure the VM to use a private network using a static IP in the reserved private address space (see the Vagrant docs on private networks for more information). We also forward a port so that once you bring the VM up you can test the connection on your host machine’s browser (at http://localhost:8080).
Looking at the ansible_local configuration, we see it points to the playbook.yml file in our directory. To keep things simple, this playbook was based on Ansible’s example, Getting Started Writing Your First Playbook. It installs Nginx, copies index.html to the right place, and starts the server listening. We won’t show the file here, but you can take a look on Github.
The inventory file, an important piece that was missing from some of the documentation, is a one-liner that matches the IP in our private network:
192.168.56.10 ansible_connection=local
Note we still give the IP even though we’ve specified “ansible_connection=local.” I ran into some issues at one point using localhost.
Finally, our Vagrantfile sets “ansible.limit = ‘all’”, which tells ansible to connect to “all the machines in our inventory” (that’s right all one of them)!
Vagrant Up
To try it out, run “vagrant up” from the directory containing the Vagrantfile. It’ll take a few minutes to download the Centos VM and configure the VM, then you can try to connect to Nginx from your web browser: http://localhost:8080.
