Ansible

At $(DAYJOB) I was asked to generate some kind of daily report, and I thought ansible would do the job; we basically want to have a couple of key metrics like load average, memory, disk… you see the deal. The result is to be send to MatterMost using mattermost’s ansible module.

It took me way too much time to understand how to update a single variable in order to build a mardown table that would be sent as a single request to the MatterMost server, until neith_speed told me to use hostvars in order to have access to the data gathered by the play for every host.

Quick one.

While working on a build chain in order to register home-baked AMIs, I wanted to use the ansible-local packer provisioner to setup the instance with a very basic playbook. I needed to provide ansible a playbook but didn’t find immediately how to achieve this within the Jenkins-packer module. Turns out it’s tricky, in the JSON Template Text (or the template file), declare the playbook_file like this:

  [{
    "type": "ansible-local",
    "playbook_file": "{{ user `test_yml` }}",
    "command": "PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 ansible-playbook"
  }]

Then in the File Entries field, the Variable Name must be test_yml and File Contents filled with the playbook.

I found myself searching ridiculously too long to achieve what I believed was a simple task: to apply an Ansible role to newly created instances… started by an Auto Scaling Group. If you’re used to Ansible you know that it relies on an inventory to apply a playbook, but obviously, when you’re firing up EC2 instances with the same playbook, you are not able to know what will be your virtual machines IP addresses, nor can ec2.py, the recommended method to deal with dynamic inventories.