The Ansible Tower is a really nice piece of visual “control center” for your Ansible installation. Ansible itself describes it as:
Centralize and control your Ansible infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, and graphical inventory management. Tower’s REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Tower into existing tools and processes. Delegate automation jobs to non-Ansible users with portal mode.
Ansible Inc. recently released the new version 2.2 of the Tower, which has really nice features for enterprise environments.
Internet access required
By default the setup procedure of the Ansible Tower 2.2 requires direct internet access. Unfortunately if you’re working in an environment with security guidelines in place, you might have no direct access to the internet.
To work around on this issue we had to use a HTTP proxy server for the Tower setup. If you’re used to Linux, you know you can set the proxy via http_proxy environment variable. Sadly these environment variables won’t be passed to Ansible, so that doesn’t help at all. Setting the proxy option in the YUM config will help yum, but the setup procedure is still using Ansible modules like pip or get_url. So eventually we found another solution, by adding the proxy environment directly to the Ansible setup tasks / roles.
Here’s the patch for that:
--- ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.orig/group_vars/all 2015-07-14 22:12:14.000000000 +0200
+++ ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.patched/group_vars/all 2015-08-11 15:18:10.288466492 +0200
@@ -48,3 +48,11 @@
# Celery Settings
# This takes the form of: max,min
# celery_autoscale: 50,4
+
+# Proxy settings
+# ==============
+
+# Specify the proxy environment.
+proxy_environment:
+ http_proxy: http://proxy.example.net
+ https_proxy: http://proxy.example.net
diff -U3 -r ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.orig/roles/packages_el/tasks/main.yml ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.patched/roles/packages_el/tasks/main.yml
--- ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.orig/roles/packages_el/tasks/main.yml 2015-07-14 22:12:13.000000000 +0200
+++ ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.patched/roles/packages_el/tasks/main.yml 2015-08-11 15:09:33.828084523 +0200
@@ -18,6 +18,7 @@
name: '{{ item }}'
state: present
with_items: yum_repo_rpms
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: determine if rhui repository exists
stat:
@@ -28,6 +29,7 @@
- name: update rh-amazon-rhui-client (RHEL EC2 only)
yum: name=rh-amazon-rhui-client state=latest
when: ansible_distribution == 'RedHat' and rhui_repo.stat.exists
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: enable rhui repositories
ini_file:
@@ -67,6 +69,7 @@
- name: install playbook dependencies
yum: name={{ item }} state=installed
with_items: el_dependencies
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Remove obsolete packages.
yum:
@@ -80,12 +83,14 @@
url: '{{ item }}'
when: yum_repo_urls is defined
with_items: yum_repo_urls
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Upgrade pip using pip.
pip:
name: pip>=1.5,<1.6
state: latest
extra_args: "--no-deps {{ pip_extra_args }}"
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Install pip dependencies
pip:
@@ -93,6 +98,7 @@
state: latest
extra_args: "--no-deps {{ pip_extra_args }}"
with_items: pip_dependencies
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Install the Tower yum repository.
template:
@@ -106,3 +112,4 @@
enablerepo: ansible-tower
disable_gpg_check: '{{not gpgcheck|bool}}'
state: latest
+ environment: proxy_environment
diff -U3 -r ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.orig/roles/packages_ubuntu/tasks/main.yml ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.patched/roles/packages_ubuntu/tasks/main.yml
--- ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.orig/roles/packages_ubuntu/tasks/main.yml 2015-07-14 22:12:13.000000000 +0200
+++ ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0.patched/roles/packages_ubuntu/tasks/main.yml 2015-08-11 15:11:13.995231422 +0200
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
name: python-pip
state: present
update_cache: yes
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Install pip dependencies
pip:
@@ -30,24 +31,28 @@
state: latest
extra_args: "--no-deps {{ pip_extra_args }}"
with_items: pip_dependencies
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: install apt repository keys
apt_key:
url: '{{ item }}'
when: apt_keys is defined
with_items: apt_keys
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: install apt repositories
apt_repository:
repo: '{{ item }}'
when: apt_repos is defined
with_items: apt_repos
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: install playbook dependencies
apt:
name: '{{ item }}'
state: installed
with_items: ubuntu_dependencies
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Remove obsolete packages.
apt:
@@ -55,6 +60,7 @@
state: absent
with_items:
- rabbitmq-server
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: A secret key may already exist; test if it does.
stat:
@@ -79,16 +85,19 @@
force: yes
when: ansible_version is defined and ansible_version.full|version_compare('1.8', '>=')
register: apt_install
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: update apt cache when using the apt-get command
apt: update_cache=yes
when: apt_install|skipped
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Install Tower package with the apt-get command.
command: "apt-get {{ (not gpgcheck|bool) and '--allow-unauthenticated' or '' }} -y install '{{tower_package_deb}}'"
changed_when: "'0 upgraded, 0 newly installed' not in result.stdout"
register: result
when: apt_install|skipped
+ environment: proxy_environment
- name: Restore the secret key.
copy:
@@ -102,3 +111,4 @@
- name: update apt cache
apt: update_cache=yes
+ environment: proxy_environment
Just download the patch and store it in /tmp/ansible-tower-setup.patch.
Setup the Tower
Here’s the full guide to setup the Ansible Tower 2.2.
Install Ansible
First of all, you’ve to install Ansible itself. You’ve two options:
- install Ansible via pip
- install Ansible via package manager
We recommend using pip, because it’s Pythons own package manager.
For Debian, that’s quite easy:
apt-get install python-pip pip install ansible
Unfortunately RedHat does no longer provide pip in RHEL 7, so you’ve to install it all by yourself:
wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-7.0.tar.gz --no-check-certificate tar xfz setuptools-7.0.tar.gz cd setuptools-7.0 python setup.py install wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py python get-pip.py pip install ansible
Alternatively you can install Ansible from Fedora’s EPEL channels, though this isn’t supported from RedHat as well:
wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm yum install epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm yum install ansible
Please note that Fedora supports ansible out of the box!
Install the Tower
Browse to the official Ansible Tower page and get your personal copy of the Tower.
When you got your ansible-tower-setup-latest.gz, you’re ready to configure the Tower setup:
# Unpack the tower setup. tar xfz ansible-tower-setup-latest.gz cd ansible-tower-setup-2.2.0/ # Configure the tower setup. ./configure
Now if you’re using a proxy, you should really patch your Tower setup roles / tasks by executing:
patch -p1 </tmp/ansible-tower-setup.patch
After you’ve patched the setup procedure, edit the proxy environment in group_vars/all, and then start the setup:
./setup.sh
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