Evaluating Ansible

July 1, 2013

categories:

Automation
Linux

I’m currently actively working on Salt, I actually have a dozen production servers at work, running critical services through it. I commit new things into the production branch every couple of days. Since Ansible seems to get all the rage (at least convinced a couple of fellow FOSS friends, Fabian, Serge, etc), I decided to give it a try and compare the two solutions.

I’m detailing here how you can start working with Ansible in about 3 minutes. I’m limiting this post to remote execution and won’t cover playbooks. That’s really for my own future reference.

By default, it uses Paramiko as transport, but in this example, I’m using regular SSH. I’m also working with two “minions” (Salt terms).

master# apt-get -y install python-yaml python-jinja2
master# ssh-keygen
master# ssh-copy-id -i ansible root@host1
master# ssh-copy-id -i ansible root@host2
master# git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git

In your .bashrc add :

source /root/ansible/hacking/env-setup
export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=/root/ansible/hosts
export ANSIBLE_TRANSPORT=ssh

Edit /root/ansible/hosts and add :

host1
host2

Now let’s test a simple command :

master## ansible all -m ping 
host02 | success >> {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
host01 | success >> {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}

master# ansible all -m command -a uptime
host02 | success | rc=0 >>
 20:27:33 up  1:50,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

host01 | success | rc=0 >>
 20:27:33 up  1:50,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Sebastien Wains

Evaluating Ansible

Thanks for reading this post!