Ansible roles are reusable objects that provide specialized tasks lists, handlers, templates and resource files within a single delivery unit: these objects can be directly accessed from the filesystem, downloaded from Git, from the online Ansible Galaxy of from a Ansible Galaxy compatible local service, such as Pulp 3. Anyway writing custom roles is really a challenging task, especially designing them to be as easy to use and maintain as possible.

The “Ansible roles best practices: practical example gitea role”post guides you into developing a custom Ansible role using a clean and tidy design that you can use as a reference to develop other custom roles.

As use case, we see how to deploy Gitea, a blazoned full featured Git Web UI supporting multiple organizations, providing authentication and authorization facilities enabling to protect repositories and branches, supporting Merge Requests and a lot of other advanced features, with of even a powerful and well standardized API that can be easily exploited by your automations. And, last but not least, ... it is even Java-free.

Ansible is a powerful datacenter automation tool that enables nearly declarative automations - "Ansible playbooks, ansible-galaxy, roles and collections" is a primer with Ansible, gradually introducing concepts that we better elaborate in other posts following this one: as we already said, Ansible is a powerful tool, and as many powerful tool can make more pain than benefits if improperly managed - the aim of this post is providing a good baseline that enable quickly enable operating Ansible running ad hoc statements, playbooks and operating using Ansible Galaxy with shelf roles and collections .

This post begins where we left with the "Ansible Tutorial – Ansible Container How-To" post, writing a playbook for preparing hosts for being managed by Ansible, learning how to use Ansible Galaxy for downloading and installing shelf Ansible roles and collections. The outcome will be a running PostgreSQL instance we will use as the DB engine in the next post of the series..

Ansible is a powerful datacenter automation tool that enables nearly declarative automations - "Ansible Tutorial - Ansible Container Howto" is the first of a series of posts dedicated to Ansible, paying particularly attention at "doing all-right": Ansible is a powerful tool, and as many powerful tool can make more pain than benefits if improperly managed.

In this post we see how to quickly set up a containerised Ansible on a workstation, configuring the environment so that it can be run from the shell without explicitly invoking podman, providing a very friendly user experience the same way, enabling it to run statements as it was really installed on the system.