Set Up VM with Ansible

Infrastructure as Code

Recently I’ve been playing a lot with Terraform, Ansible and Kubernetes mostly related to work. With these three, DevOps engineers can build the infrastructure with code without much problem compared to the previous generation of technology.

Ansible Overview

Ansible makes it easy to build and configure VMs.

Installation

# Install Ansible using pip
pip3 install ansible

Environment

# Check Ansible version
ansible -v
# Output: ansible 2.7.10

Preparing VM for Ansible

1. Initial Setup

1. Install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
2. Create an account: deployer
3. Set up the SSH key

2. SSH Configuration

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

# Disable password authentication
PasswordAuthentication no

# Change SSH port (optional)
Port 1022

3. Sudo Configuration

Edit /etc/sudoers:

# Change from:
# %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# To:
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

4. Update Sources

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list:

# Comment out any lines starting with cdrom:
# cdrom:[Ubuntu 16.04 LTS _Xenial Xerus_ - Release amd64 (20160420.1)]/ xenial main restricted

SSH Fingerprint

To get the SSH fingerprint from your public key:

ssh-keygen -E md5 -lf ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | awk '{print $2}'
# Output example: MD5:93:2c:6e:5c:6b:c6:4e:bb:07:77:33:56:51:26:84:1a

Ansible Roles

Using Ansible Galaxy

1. Browse popular and stable roles at Ansible Galaxy
2. Install roles:

# Install a specific role
ansible-galaxy install franklinkim.fail2ban

# Install roles from requirements file
ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

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