MediaWiki was developed originally for Wikipedia and has grown to support lots of sites. With this in mind you may consider installing MediaWiki and running a local wiki, especially as MediaWiki provides instructions on specific operating system installs. In an effort to speed up installs I’ve created an Ansible playbook to carry out the MediaWiki … Continue reading Installing MediaWiki with Ansible (Linux)
I have used previous blog posts to discuss using Ansible to create / manage AWS EC2 instances, and using Terraform with Ansible to create / manage AWS EC2 instances. However, there are people that prefer to use the AWS web console over Infrastructure as Code (IaC). If you find yourself in the situation of creating … Continue reading AWS – EC2 User Data: Preparing Ubuntu Instance For Ansible Management (AWS / Ansible)
It is recommended to password protect private SSH keys, so if they do ever end up in the wrong hands then a password is still needed to access them. If you wanted to go really secure Ansible Vault could be used to encrypt the private key alongside the password. This would require the key to … Continue reading Ansible – SSH and Password Protected Private Keys (Linux)
One of the frequent teachings I have learned whilst learning programming languages is that repeated blocks of code should be, where possible, placed into a function so that the function can be called multiple times instead of writing out the code multiple times. This approach as the benefits of: Producing repeatable results Reducing the chances … Continue reading The DRY principle: Ansible and variables
My previous blog posts looked at what Terraform is and also how to deploy an AWS EC2 instance with Terraform. In this blog post I am going to alter my main.tf file so that Terraform also creates a new AWS security group with some ingress rules and also runs an Ansible playbook against the new … Continue reading Terraform – Security Groups, Provisioners and Ansible
When running an Ansible playbook (or roles) it becomes a little bit irksome to have to create new playbooks just because a device may have a different operating system. Thankfully the awesome people behind Ansible have a solution for this. A Little Background… I have my inventory set in a file called “inventory” in the … Continue reading Changing Ansible Playbook Depending On Operating System (Ansible)
In my previous blog post I used Ansible to create an AWS EC2 instance and discussed how to do this via the Ansible ec2 module. Today I am going to go slightly more in depth with creating multiple instances, inventory groups and tagging. The playbook I am using for this section is “create_multiple_ec2_instances.yml” and can … Continue reading Using Ansible with AWS – Creating Multiple EC2 Instances, Tagging Them and ELK (AWS/Ansible)
So far most of my Ansible blog posts have been deploying or configuring local devices (i.e. normally one of my Raspberry Pis), but the whole idea of Ansible is that it can build whole infrastructures as code (well, YAML files in my incase). The best place to see infrastructure as code is the cloud and … Continue reading Using Ansible With AWS – Creating EC2 Instances (AWS / Ansible)
If you want to see metrics in real time and look at web dashboards then Grafana and Prometheus may be the tools you are looking for, and if you are anything like me then you probably want to automate as much of the install as possible via Ansible. My Set Up For this blog post … Continue reading Grafana, Prometheus and Node Exporter On Raspberry Pi via Ansible (Raspberry Pi and Linux)
If you are moving files between computers then you may be doing this by transferring the files to a physical medium (e.g. a USB pen drive), via email or via scp. However, there are other options including Ansible which has two modules to help, Copy and Fetch. Copy The Copy module can be used to … Continue reading Ansible’s Copy and Fetch Modules
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