I use Ansible. And I use it **a lot**. Like, there's now nearly nothing I deploy manually, without it. As such I've written a lot of roles, to deploy and manage various applications. This include :
* Basic system configuration
* Authentication (eg, configure LDAP auth, or join an AD domain automatically)
* Plumber layers (like deploy a MySQL server, a PHP stack etc.)
* Authentication services (Samba4 in AD DC mode, Lemonldap::NG etc.)
Most of my roles are RHEL centric (tested on AlmaLinux now that CentOS Linux is dead), and are made to be deployed on AlmaLinux 8 servers. Basic roles (like basic system configuration, postfix etc.) also support Debian/Ubuntu systems, but are less tested.
My roles are often dependent on other roles. For example, if you deploy glpi, it'll first pull all the required web and PHP stack.
Most of the web application roles are made to run behind a reverse proxy. You can use for this the nginx (recommended) or the httpd_front role.
## how to use this
Here're the steps to make use of this. Note that this is not a complete ansible how-to, just a quick guide to use my roles. For example, it'll not explain how to make use of ansible-vault to protect sensitive informations.
* Create your SSH key. It's advised to set a passphrase to protect it
```
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ssh/id_rsa
```
* Create the ansible user account on the hosts you want to manage. This can be done manually or can be automated with tools like kickstart (you can have a look at https://ks.lapiole.org/alma8.ks for example). The ansible user must have elevated privileges with sudo (so you have to ensure sudo is installed)
* Create your inventory file. For example, inventories/acme.ini
```
[infra]
db.acme.com
proxyin.acme.com
```
This will create a single group **infra** with two hosts in it.
* Create your main playbook. This is the file describing what to deploy on which host. You can store it at in the root dir, for example, acme.yml :
```
- name: Deploy common profiles
hosts: infra
roles:
- common
- backup
- name: Deploy databases servers
hosts: db.acme.com
roles:
- mysql_server
- postgresql_server
- name: Deploy reverse proxy
hosts: proxyin.acme.com
roles:
- nginx
- letsencrypt
- lemonldap_ng
```
It's pretty self-explanatory. First, roles **common** and **backup** will be deployed on every hosts in the infra group. Then, **mysql_server** and **postgresql_server** will be deployed on **db.acme.com**. And roles **nginx**, **letsencrypt** and **lemonldap_ng** will be deployed on host **proxyin.acme.com**
* Now, it's time to configure a few things. Configuration is done be assigning values to varibles, and can be done at several levels.
Every role has default variables set in the defaults sub folder. You can have a look at it to see which variables are available and what default value they have.
## Contact
You can contact me at ansible AT lapiole DOT org if needed