1<section>
2 <p>
3 Every time that I do a clean install on my machine it takes a few hours till I
4 get to point where I was before formatting it, install all packages, select
5 themes, icons, fonts, install IDEs, extensions and so on. After doing it a few
6 times I came to the conclusion that I would save time by spending time
7 automating this chore, and as a result, I could tinker a little more with my
8 system and not worry about spending a weekend re-installing everything (which
9 have happened more time that I'd like to remember).
10 </p>
11 <p>
12 So after a few attempts using python and bash I ended with many files and
13 keep everything organized and concise turned out to be more tedious than the
14 setup itself. So there comes <a href="https://www.ansible.com/">Ansible</a>.
15 It is an enterprise-graded software used to automate tasks. It has A LOT OF
16 features and it can be really helpful if you're a sysadmin but for now we're
17 going to focuson
18 <a href="https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_intro.html#ansible-pull">
19 Ansible Pull
20 </a>
21 and
22 <a href="https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks.html">
23 Playbooks
24 </a>. As better described:
25 <blockquote>
26 [Ansible-Pull] is used to up a remote copy of ansible on each managed
27 node, each set to run via cron and update playbook source via a source
28 repository. This inverts the default push architecture of Ansible into a
29 pull architecture, which has near-limitless scaling potential.
30
31 Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration
32 language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to
33 enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.
34 (<a href="https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-pull.html">source</a>)
35 </blockquote>
36 </p>
37 <p>
38 The goal is to pull and run a playbook remotely using a git repository. The
39 playbook will describe the tasks needed to setup our machine from scratch.
40 <br/>
41 But first lets tinker a bit a with playbooks locally with ansible-playbook,
42 to do so we need to add localhost to ansible's hosts list. Add it to
43 /etc/ansible/hosts:
44<pre><code>[all]
45localhost</code></pre>
46 </p>
47 <p>
48 As an experiment we're going to write a asks to install vim. Currently, I'm
49 using Fedora thus we going to use dnf modeule to install packages, but if
50 you're using another distribution look for a equivalent module like apt
51 module for Ubuntu.
52
53 The playbook to install is quite simple:
54
55<pre><code># main.yaml
56- hosts: all
57 tasks:
58 - name: install vim
59 dnf:
60 name: vim
61 state: latest</code></pre>
62 <dl>
63 <dt>host</dt>
64 <dd>it is required and it has to match our hosts otherwise the playbook won't run.</dd>
65 <dt>taks</dt>
66 <dd>
67 it is the list of tasks that the playbook will perform, in this case
68 will be dnf install vim.
69 </dd>
70 </dl>
71 </p>
72 <p>
73 To run a playbook use the command ansible-playbook commando to run main.yml
74 direct from disk, do to so just run the following command:
75<pre><code>sudo ansible-playbook --connection=local main.yml</code></pre>
76 </p>
77 <p>
78 After a few seconds, vim will be installed on your machine.
79<pre><code>PLAY [all] *************************************************************
80
81TASK [Gathering Facts] *************************************************
82ok: [localhost]
83
84TASK [install vim] *****************************************************
85ok: [localhost]
86
87PLAY RECAP *************************************************************
88localhost : ok=2 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0</code></pre>
89 </p>
90 <p>
91 This is the first step, next part we shall create a more complex playbook and
92 setup repository to run it remotely using ansible-pull.
93 </p>
94</section>