What? Why?

That's an example playbook utilizing arrr shared roles and a Vagrantfile simplifying VM provisioning with help of Vagrant.

Please use it as a guideline how to use and configure your Ansible playbook with arrr roles.

Requirements

To test demo playbook Ansible is required. It is probably possible to do that without it but I have no idea why and it's definitely easier with Ansible.

Next we need a machine to provision, most likely a VM. The easiest way to have one is to use e.g. VirtualBox. To simplify and automate creation of VM we can use Vagrant. So:

Ansible - installing Ansible
Vagrant - installing Vagrant
VirtualBox - installing VirtualBox

Manual installation

To install roles manually we simply need to clone the arrr repository into our roles directory:

cd roles_dir
git clone git@github.com:gbrylinski/arrr arrr

next we have to add cloned directory to roles_path in ansible.cfg file so it knows how to find the roles:

#
# ansible.cfg file
#
[defaults]
roles_path = ./arrr

Installation with ansible-galaxy

Some smart people some day realized that manual installation can be cumbersome especially if many roles are going to be installed. They created a tool which we can use to make our life a bit easier and named it ansible-galaxy. To install arrr roles with ansible-galaxy we just need to:

ansible-galaxy -r requirements.yml install

next, similarly to manual installation, we need to point Ansible to directory where our installed roles have been written. To do that we have to modify roles_path in ansible.cfg:

#
# ansible.cfg file
#
[defaults]
roles_path = roles_dir:roles_dir/arrr

Please notice repeated roles_dir entry. It's kind of hack to work around the way Ansible tools work. ansible-galaxy uses first entry as a base directory to unpack fetched roles. In our case roles would be unpacked into roles_dir/arrr which exactly matches second entry.

Running playbook with Vagrant

It's the simplest way to check how this roles work. To start everything automagically we just need to execute:

vagrant up --provision

Voila! Now it's recommended to get some coffee and see what's new on YouTube. After some minutes machine should be provisioned and ready to use. To ssh to our vagranted machine:

vagrant ssh

That's it. Machine is ready to explore.

Running playbook without Vagrant

It's also very simple. All we need is to execute one liner:

ansible-playbook -i our_inventory_file playbook.yml