Getting Started with Ansible Galaxy

• ansible
• ansible-galaxy

In this tutorial, we show you how to use Ansible Galaxy. Ansible Galaxy is a tool that seeks to give visibility to one of Ansible’s most exciting features: reusable roles for server configuration or the installation of applications. Many users share roles on Ansible Galaxy.

Ansible roles consist of playbooks that group multiple tasks into one container. They allow the performance of automation tasks with clean directory structures.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

• A Scaleway account logged into the console
• Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
• An Instance running Ubuntu Linux
• Basic knowledge of Ansible and Ansible-Apache
• Ansible-Apache installed on your local computer

Creating a LAMP server with Ansible roles

To use roles in Ansible playbooks, you must first download them.

1. Install Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

   ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.apache geerlingguy.mysql geerlingguy.php
   

   Note

   In this example, we use geerlinguy’s role, which is a software developer involved in many open-source development communities. The latest version will be downloaded if you do not specify which one you want to download. Add the version after the role name to specify a version. Example: geerlingguy.apache,1.0.0 or geerlingguy.mysql,1.0.0. If you want to use other roles, check out geerlinguy’s Ansible profile.

2. Create an Ansible playbook named lamp.yml with the following contents:

   ---
     - hosts: all
       roles:
         - geerlingguy.mysql
         - geerlingguy.apache
         - geerlingguy.php
   

3. Run the playbook against a host

   ansible-playbook lamp.yml
   

The LAMP server is now created.

Creating a Solr server with Ansible roles

Apache Solr is a fast open-source Java search server. Solr enables you to easily create search engines that search websites, databases, and files.

1. Install Java, tomcat6, Solr with an ansible-galaxy command. We will use the role of geerlinguy who is a software developer involved in many open-source development communities. Check geerlinguy for many other roles.

   ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.java geerlingguy.tomcat6 geerlingguy.solr
   

2. Create a playbook named solr.yml with the following contents:

     ---
     - hosts: all
       roles:
         - geerlingguy.java
         - geerlingguy.tomcat6
         - geerlingguy.solr
   

3. Run the playbook against a host

   ansible-playbook solr.yml
   

The Solr server is now created.

Helpful Galaxy commands

Some other helpful ansible-galaxy commands are:

• ansible-galaxy list displays a list of installed roles, with version numbers
• ansible-galaxy remove [role] removes an installed role
• ansible-galaxy init can be used to create a role template suitable for submission to Ansible Galaxy

Additionally, you can configure the default path where Ansible roles are downloaded by editing your ansible.cfg configuration file (normally located in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg) and setting a roles_path in the [defaults] section.

For more information on Galaxy commands, refer to the official documentation.