Setup Ansible Control Node

Projects: c2platform/rws/ansible-gis, c2platform.core

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for setting up an Ansible Control Node  on Red Hat 8, specifically on the gsd-ansible node. While primarily intended for Ansible Ad-Hoc tasks, this control node can also serve as a graphical user interface (GUI) for lightweight development work, accessible via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). By following these guidelines, you’ll be able to create a versatile control node environment that supports both quick automation tasks and convenient development capabilities.

Overview

This guide sets up an Ansibel Control Node / lightweight development environment. This setupinvolves Vagrant and Ansible executing the following tasks:

1. Vagrant employs the VirtualBox Provider to instantiate a Red Hat 8 VM, including registering the node with Red Hat using a Developer license subscription. See Streamlining RHEL Registration and Subscription Automation for more information.
2. Vagrant utilizes the Ansible provisioner to run an playbook that installs or upgrades essential packages like pip, setuptools, psycopg2-binary, curl, git, and tree. Additionally, configure Xrdp to start at boot time and set up a Red Hat Desktop Environment.

The diagram below illustrates the default provisioning process in the development environment using Vagrant and Ansible. The following VMs are created: gsd-ansible, gsd-agserver1 and gsd-rproxy1.

The Ansible Control Node, gsd-ansible, can be used separately to provision and manage the nodes using Ansible without relying on Vagrant.

These diagrams demonstrate the two provisioning approaches: one using Vagrant and Ansible together, and the other using Ansible independently with the Ansible Control Node.

Prerequisites

• Red Hat requires a subscription of course. In the RWS development environment we can use a developer license  .
• RWS Development Environment.

Setup

To set up the node, run the following command:

vagrant up gsd-ansible

Verify

To verify the node has be correctly created / provisioned, in this section it is described how to connect to the node, create an Ansible environment, install Ansible and then provision node gsd-rproxy1 using this environment. These steps mimic the steps that each engineer must follow at RWS to setup their own personalized Ansible workspace.

RDP Connection

You can now create a RDP connection to this node using for example Remmina  . You should be able to connect using user vagrant with password vagrant.

Ansible environment

Install pyenv  :

curl https://pyenv.run | bash

Add the following lines to ~/.bashrc:

export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"

Install Python 3.10.6

source ~/.bashrc
pyenv install 3.10.6
pyenv global 3.10.6

Create Python virtual environment using penv virtualenv:

pyenv virtualenv rws
pyenv virtualenvs  # this will output all virtual environments available including "rws"
pyenv virtualenv-init rws
pyenv activate rws

In ~/.bashrc add

eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"
pyenv activate rws

Install Ansible

Install Ansible, including PIP packages for Kerberos and WinRM.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt  # ansible creates this file in vagrant home

Alternatively, you can run the following commands:

pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install ansible-core==2.11.12
pip3 install setuptools_rust
pip3 install yamllint==1.28.0 ansible-lint==6.8.6 pre-commit==2.20.0
pip3 install pywinrm==0.4.3
pip3 install requests-kerberos
pip3 install pywinrm[kerberos] requests-kerberos pykerberos

Mount Dev Collections

Once you have set up your Ansible environment, you can proceed with various tasks such as cloning the c2platform/rws/ansible-gis project, downloading Ansible collections, and provisioning nodes using Ansible.

To ensure that your environment is functional, the easiest way however is to utilize the /vagrant mount. This mount contains the c2platform/rws/ansible-gis project from your host. The only missing component is the ansible-dev-collections folder.

To incorporate this folder into gsd-ansible, you can create a special local and hidden file called .sync_folders.yml with the following contents. This file is in the git ignore list:

---
- src: ../ansible-dev-collections/
  target: /ansible-dev-collections

Provision with Ansible

Once you reload, you should be able to provision the gsd environment as follows:

vagrant reload gsd-ansible  # will create /ansible-dev-collections mount
vagrant ssh gsd-ansible
cd /vagrant
ansible-playbook plays/mw/reverse-proxy.yml -i hosts.ini

Please note that the above provision assumes that you have the gsd-agserver1 already up and running.

With the Ansible Control Node, gsd-ansible, you can now manage the nodes using Ansible alone. Vagrant is no longer involved in the process.

See Vagrant Sync folders for more information about the .sync_folders.yml file.

Review

The provisioning process for this node is determined by the file in the folder group_vars/ansible file, which utilizes the bootstrap_packages list, as well as the plays/mgmt/ansible.yml play. You can find the files in the Ansible project c2platform/rws/ansible-gis.