MAAS Configuration

Used for pulling a fresh MAAS setup

Update your system via ansible-pull

Introduction

This repository contains playbooks to update a Linux system using ansible-pull. It is intended as a simple yet reasonably useful example of running Ansible in pull mode.

At present it supports the following OS variants:

• RHEL 7+, Centos 7+
• Fedora
• Ubuntu (>16.04)

Prerequisite

Ansible needs to be installed in order to run any Ansible playbook.

On most Linux distributions installing Ansible is a simple package install:

On Ubuntu do:

sudo apt install ansible

On Fedora do:

sudo dnf install -y ansible

Similarly, on RHEL/CentOS do:

sudo yum -y install ansible

Or refer to the official installation documentation

Usage

The ansible-pull command can be run in one of two ways:

1. manually
2. unattended

Manual Usage

To run the ansible-pull manually use a command like the following:

url='https://github.com/jschulthess/ansible-pull-update.git' # URL of the playbook repository
checkout='develop'                                            # branch/tag/commit to checkout
directory='/var/projects/ansible-pull-update'           # directory to checkout repository to
logfile='/var/log/ansible-pull-update.log'                            # where to put the logs

sudo ansible-pull -o -C ${checkout} -d ${directory} -i ${directory}/inventory -U ${url} \
  2>&1 | sudo tee -a ${logfile}

Unattended Usage

To make the playbook run unattended at regular intervals the above command is typically installed as a cron job. For convenience a playbook "ansible-pull-setup.yml" has been included which can be used to install the cron job and log rotation.

Note: before running the playbook to install make sure to set the reposigory URL by replacing the string SUPPLY_YOUR_OWN_GIT_URL_HERE in the playbook.

To install, simply run the playbook on the host to be ansible-pull enabled.

ansible-playbook ansible-pull-setup.yml

The playbook creates a cron entry which runs ansible-pull every 15 minutes. Check the logfine and verify that an attempt to update the system is indeed done regularly.

Integration

The roles subdirectory contains a role "provision_ansible_pull_update" which can be used to integrate the ansible-pull execution into a provisioning system like 'Foreman/Katello'. This allows to apply ansible-pull as a simple role on any host in Foreman using the 'foreman_ansible' plugin.

The role contains the following variables that can be overridden:

• schedule: Cron schedule. Default: '*/15 * * * *'

• cron_user: User to run ansible-pull as from cron. Default: "root"

• logfile: File that ansible will use for logs. Default: /var/log/ansible-pull.log

• workdir: Directory to where repository will be cloned. Default: /var/lib/ansible/local

• repo_url: Repository to check out -- YOU MUST CHANGE THIS The repo must contain a local.yml file at top level

A second role included in the sub-dicrectory roles is "ansible_user_setup". It is intended to be imported into foreman and applied to a newly provisioned host to add an Ansible user (default: ops) allow devops for the provisioned host to be done using Ansible through the ansible_foreman plugin.