ansible-utils

Ansible wrappers

install

$ cd ~/bin
$ git clone https://github.com/t0mk/ansible-utils
$ echo 'PATH=${PATH}:~/bin/ansible-utils' >> ~/.zshrc

# if you still use Bash I encourage you to check zsh and oh-my-zsh but anyway:
# echo 'PATH=${PATH}:~/bin/ansible-utils' >> ~/.bashrc

ansible-get-roles

This is sth like librarian for ansible. It downloads all the roles from their git repos. It takes the first playbook from a file and processes all the dicts in the 'roles' item.

Use as

$ cd playbook_dir
$ ansible-get-roles -p playbook.yml

This is not necessary as of 1.8. You should use ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

ansible-print-all-user-variables-in-role

This prints all the variables used in a role. It prints it as a markdown bulletpoints. It's useful when you are writing a role and want to start a README.md. You can do sth like:

$ cd roles/redmine
$ ansible-print-all-used-variables-in-role
* `redmine_branch` -
* `redmine_db` -
[...]

$ ansible-print-all-used-variables-in-role >> README.md

It's not perfect yet.

ansible-apply-role-to-host

This is for the case when you stumble upon an ansible role on github and you would like to check how it works for you, or for your VM image, or OS version.

Let's stay you found a role, and you have a testing instance "testhost" running somewhere (Openstack, Amazon, ...). The "testhost" is listed in your inventory and ansible can run on it. In other words ansible -m ping testhost succeeds.

(irrelevant note: If you use some IaaS, I advise to check the dynamic inventory scripts shipped with ansible - ansible/plugins/inventory)

To try a role, normally you would have to create directory structure, clone the role and write a playbook. With the script, you can instead just do:

$ ansible-apply-role-to-host -r https://github.com/t0mk/dummy_ansible_role.git testhost

If the role has parameters, you can put them to a file as a yaml dict and pass the filename to the script in the -p/--params argument:

$ echo "dummy_ansible_role_parameter: defined_in_params" > params.yml
$ ansible-apply-role-to-host -r https://github.com/t0mk/dummy_ansible_role.git -p params.yml testhost

You can also pass more than one host in positional arguments.