Skip to main content

Creating Roles

Ansible Galaxy

Ansible has a built in tool ansible-galaxy which allows us to quickly create a set of folders and files that are needed in the creation of an Ansible role. Simply run ansible-galaxy init rolename --offline and a folder will be created within your current directory that contains the basic structure of an Ansible role. Within this directory, we can easily pick and choose which components we will need for our role. 

Creating NGINX Roles

To begin, we will create a simple role for installing and configuring a simple nginx server. Navigate within your role, which we will assume is simply called nginx-role

Define Tasks

Within nginx-role/tasks/main.yml we include the following - 

---
# tasks file for /etc/ansible/roles/nginx
-
    

  • import_tasks: install.yml
    • 
- 
  • import_tasks: configure.yml
    • 
- 
  • import_tasks: service.yml

This task assumes that within the nginx-role/tasks/ directory we also have the files install.yml, configure.yml, and service.yml - See the below snippets for examples of how these files could look, depending on your scenario.
Within the nginx-role/tasks/ directory, create the following files - 

install.yml

---
- name: Install nginx Package
  apt: name=nginx state=latest

configure.yml

---
- name: Copy nginx configuration file
  template: src=files/nginx.conf dest=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
- name: Copy index.html file
  template: src=files/index.html dest=/var/www/html
  notify:
    - restart nginx

service.yml

---
- name: Start and enable nginx service
  service: name=nginx state=restarted enabled=yes

Now we have defined all the tasks that Ansible needs to carryout in order to create a new nginx host. All thats left to do is ensure that the tasks we created above have all the resources we said would be available when the role is ran on a host.

Define Handlers

In the tasks above, notice the notify: -restart nginx within configure.yml. Here, we have declared that this task makes changes that require nginx to be restarted in order to be applied. So, we create the handler task below to carry out the restart nginx task that we have notified of our changes.
Within the nginx-role/handlers/ directory, create the following

main.yml

---
# handlers file for /etc/ansible/roles/nginx
#
-
    

  • name: restart nginx
service: name=nginx state=restarted
Define Templates / Files

Ansible will need to refer to the templates / files we declared in the above tasks -
Add them within the nginx-role/files/ directory

nginx.conf

user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events { }


http {
include mime.types;

# 
Basic Server Configuration


server {
listen 80;
server_tokens off;
server_name {{ domain_name }};


location / {
  root {{ nginx_root_dir }};
  index {{ index_files }};
}

# Uncomment to pass for SSL
#return 301 https://$host$request_uri;



}
}

index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>
<style>
    body {
        width: 35em;
        margin: 0 auto;
        font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
    }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Klips!</h1>
<p>If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and
working. Further configuration is required.</p>

<p>For online documentation and support please refer to
<a href="http://nginx.org/">nginx.org</a>.<br/>
Commercial support is available at
<a href="http://nginx.com/">nginx.com</a>.</p>


<p><em>Thank you for using nginx.</em></p>
</body>
</html>
Define Variables / Defaults

Last, we need to define the Ansible defaults we referenced in the above configurations {{ variable_name }} is a variable within Ansible, these can be used to create roles that can be used dynamically or easily reconfigured and reapplied to different scenarios.
Create the following file in nginx-role/defaults

main.yml

---
# defaults file for /etc/ansible/roles/nginx
#
domain_name: "localhost"
nginx_root_dir: "/var/www/html/"
index_files: "index.html index.htm"

Using Ansible Roles 

Thats it! Now all we need to do is create an inventory / hosts file and run a playbook using our new role - 

/etc/ansible/hosts

# This is the default ansible 'hosts' file.
#
# It should live in /etc/ansible/hosts

[group]
www.domain.com
sub.domain.com:22
0.0.0.0
127.0.0.1:22


[othergroup]
sub.domain.com:22
127.0.0.1:22


[nginx-server]
sub.domain.com:22

/etc/ansible/nginx.yml

---
- hosts: nginx-server
  become: yes
  roles:
  - nginx

 

Now from within /etc/ansible/, simply run ansible-playbook nginx.yml and our tasks configured above will be carried out on the server defined in the hosts file above.

Back to top