JINJA2 With Python Tutorial JINJA Ansible Howto

Posted on December 17, 2024December 17, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

JINJA2 is a powerful yet easy to use templating engine that enables easily generating documents on the fly blending one or more objects with a template.

Since the syntax is heavily inspired by Django and Python, JINJA2 is not only commonly used inside Python scripts: it is very often exploited by Ansible, for example when generating configuration files on the fly.

In "JINJA2 With Python Tutorial JINJA Ansible Howto" post we will learn all the must know about JINJA2, and experiment with it by writing a real-life JINJA2 template file, rendering it by merging it with a JSON document using a custom Python script and an Ansible playbook.

Ansible roles best practices: practical example gitea role

Posted on July 9, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

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 playbooks best practices: caveats and pitfalls

Posted on June 19, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible is an extremely powerful data center automation tool: most of its power comes from not being too strict into defining a structure - this enables it to be used into extremely complex scenarios as well as to very quickly set it up in quite trivial scenarios.

But this is a two edged sword: too many times I saw POC for adopting it permed POC with too poor requirements, thinking they can reuse what they experimented as a baseline for structuring Ansible: this is a very harmful error that quickly lead to unmaintainable real life environments with duplicated code and settings, often stored into structures without a consistent logic or naming, so losing the most of the benefits of such a great automation tool.

Ansible playbooks best practices: caveats and pitfalls starts from where we left with Ansible inventory best practices: caveats and pitfalls, exploring how to properly deal with writing playbooks, structuring things both to promote maintainability as well as to ease the operation and configuration tasks.

Ansible inventory best practices: caveats and pitfalls

Posted on June 18, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible inventory best practices: caveats and pitfalls is the post from where we begin exploring how to properly structure Ansible to get all of its power without compromises, structuring things in an easy and straightforward way suitable for almost every operating scenario.

Ansible playbooks, ansible-galaxy, roles and collections

Posted on May 16, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

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 Tutorial – Ansible Container Howto

Posted on May 15, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

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.