Table Of ContentLearn Ansible
Automate cloud, security, and network infrastructure using
Ansible 2.x
Russ McKendrick
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Learn Ansible
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Contributors
About the author
Russ McKendrick is an experienced solution architect who has been working in IT and
related industries for over 25 years. During his career, he has had varied responsibilities,
from looking after an entire IT infrastructure to providing first-line, second-line, and senior
support in both client-facing and internal teams for large organizations.
Russ supports open source systems and tools on public and private clouds at Node4
Limited, where he heads up the public cloud team.
I would like to thank my family and friends for their support and being so understanding
about all of the time I have spent in front of the computer writing. I would also like to
thank my colleagues at Node4 and our customers for their kind words of support and
encouragement throughout the writing process.
About the reviewer
Paul Adamson has worked as an Ops engineer, a developer, a DevOps engineer, and
all variations and mixes of all of these. When not reviewing this book, Paul keeps busy
helping companies embrace the AWS infrastructure. His language of choice is PHP for all
the good reasons and even some of the bad, but mainly habit. While reviewing this book,
Paul has been working for Healthy Performance Ltd, helping to apply cutting-
edge technology to a cutting-edge approach to well-being.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Ansible 7
Ansible's story 9
The term 9
The software 9
Ansible versus other tools 11
Declarative versus imperative 11
Configuration versus orchestration 13
Infrastructure as code 14
Summary 16
Further reading 16
Chapter 2: Installing and Running Ansible 17
Technical requirements 17
Installing Ansible 18
Installing on macOS 18
Homebrew 18
The pip method 21
Pros and cons 22
Installing on Linux 24
Installing on Windows 10 Professional 26
Launching a virtual machine 29
An introduction to playbooks 34
Host inventories 35
Playbooks 38
Summary 50
Questions 51
Further reading 51
Chapter 3: The Ansible Commands 52
Technical requirements 52
Inbuilt commands 53
Ansible 53
The ansible-config command 59
The ansible-console command 61
The ansible-doc command 62
The ansible-inventory command 64
Ansible Vault 65
Third-party commands 70
Table of Contents
The ansible-inventory-grapher command 71
Ansible Run Analysis 74
Summary 76
Questions 77
Further reading 77
Chapter 4: Deploying a LAMP Stack 78
Technical requirements 78
Playbook structure 79
LAMP stack 81
Common 82
Updating packages 83
Installing common packages 84
Configuring NTP 85
Creating a user 86
Running the role 87
Apache 91
Installing Apache 91
Configuring Apache 92
Configuring SELinux 94
Copying an HTML file 95
Running the role 96
MariaDB 99
Installing MariaDB 100
Configuring MariaDB 102
Importing a sample database 103
Running the role 106
PHP 111
Installing PHP 111
The phpinfo file 113
Adminer 113
Running the role 115
Overriding variables 118
Summary 119
Questions 119
Further reading 119
Chapter 5: Deploying WordPress 120
Technical requirements 120
Preinstallation tasks 121
The stack-install command 122
Enabling the repositories 123
Installing the packages 125
The stack-config role 126
WordPress system user 127
NGINX configuration 127
PHP and PHP-FPM configuration 133
[ ii ]
Table of Contents
Starting NGINX and PHP-FPM 135
MariaDB Configuration 135
SELinux configuration 137
WordPress installation tasks 137
WordPress CLI installation 138
Creating the WordPress database 138
Downloading, configuring, and installing WordPress 139
WordPress plugins and theme installation 141
Running the WordPress playbook 143
Summary 153
Questions 153
Further reading 153
Chapter 6: Targeting Multiple Distributions 155
Technical requirements 155
Launching multiple Vagrant boxes 156
Multi-operating system considerations 159
Adapting the roles 160
Operating system family 160
The stack-install role 162
The stack-config role 166
The wordpress role 168
Running the playbook 169
Summary 176
Questions 177
Further reading 177
Chapter 7: The Core Network Modules 178
Technical requirements 178
Manufacturer and device support 178
The modules 179
A10 Networks 179
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) 179
Cisco AireOS 179
Apstra Operating System (AOS) 179
Aruba Mobility Controller 180
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 180
Avi Networks 180
Big Switch Networks 180
Citrix Netscaler 180
Huawei CloudEngine (CE) 180
Arista CloudVision (CV) 181
Lenovo CNOS 181
Cumulus Linux (CL) 181
Dell operating system 10 (DellOS10) 181
Ubiquiti EdgeOS 181
[ iii ]
Table of Contents
Lenovo Enterprise Networking Operating System (ENOS) 181
Arista EOS 182
F5 BIG-IP 182
FortiGate FortiManager 182
FortiGate FortiOS 182
illumos 182
Cisco IOS and IOS XR 182
Brocade IronWare 183
Juniper Junos 183
Nokia NetAct 183
Pluribus Networks Netvisor OS 183
Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) 183
Nokia Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) 183
Cisco NX-OS (NXOS) 184
Mellanox ONYX 184
Ordnance 184
Open vSwitch (OVS) 184
Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS 184
Radware 184
Nokia Networks Service Router Operating System (SROS) 185
VyOS 185
System 185
Interacting with a network device 185
Launching the network device 186
The VyOS role 187
Running the playbook 193
Summary 196
Questions 196
Further reading 196
Chapter 8: Moving to the Cloud 199
Technical requirements 199
Interacting with DigitalOcean 199
Generating a personal access token 200
Installing dopy 202
Launching a Droplet 202
Running the playbook 207
WordPress on DigitalOcean 209
The host inventory 210
Variables 210
The playbook 212
The droplet role 212
Running the playbook 213
Summary 214
Questions 215
Further reading 215
[ iv ]
