Quick Start

The steps below will get a fresh system up and running with ansible quickly.

Install ansible

If you haven’t already¹.

sudo apt install ansible

Change user

You’ll want an account that can run python and ssh out. It’s best to have a dedicated user.²

(I like ansible as a user.)

su ansible

Download this repository

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/mfeuhrer/ansible.git

Create an SSH keypair

if you don’t already have one.³

ssh-keygen

Copy it to authorized_keys in the resources directory:

echo ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > ~/ansible/resources/.ssh/authorized_keys

Create an inventory file

using the supported tags found in the docs folder.

nano ~/hosts

Ansible.cfg

Copy (or simlink) ansible.cfg from the resources folder to your ansible user’s home folder.

cp ~/ansible/resources/ansible/ansible.cfg ~/ansible.cfg

or

ln -s ~/ansible/resources/ansible/ansible.cfg ~/ansible.cfg

Test Connections

You are now ready to run playbooks. Try the following command to validate connectivity to your hosts.

ansible all -m ping

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1. Obviously I prefer debian based systems. ↩

2. If you don’t already have an account for this, one of my playbooks is an example of creating a user account at scale. You could use that playbook and target only your ansible host to create the user. ↩

3. If you’re me, you’ll use the existing keypair. Conveniently the correct authorized_keys file is already in this repo! ↩