Configuration Management using Ansible

Objectives

Create an ansible playbook that is able to:

• Provision: Create a new virtual machine from a virtual machine provider (in this case, Amazon EC2)

• Setup: Install the following items:

  • Install node.js
  • Install forever
  • Pull/clone this simple server (from github) into a destination
  • Install npm packages

• Tasks:

  • Run app using node and forever forever start node main.js
  • Security: A task that ensures bash, openssl, openssh-client, and openssh-server are running latest version.
  • Cleanup: Removing content in /tmp/*

Instructions

1. Install vagrant.

2. Install VirtualBox.

3. Open Terminal on Mac OS X or command prompt on Windows and initialize a virtual machine.

   vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

   This will create a Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine.

4. Boot the virtual machine using:

   vagrant up

5. SSH into the virtual maching using:

   vagrant ssh

6. Then download and run this shell script by using. ansible.sh.

   • The script will automatically install all dependencies required for ansible and also install ansible.

   • Then it clones this repository.

   • After cloning, it runs the Ansible playbook to create a new AWS EC2 instance and then perform the necessary configuration management tasks.

   • Finally the simple web server app is started automatically.