Day: April 16, 2023

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Getting Notification from Ansible

I have been learning from this book Fabio Alessandro Locati, published under Packt>. The example can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-Ansible-2.X-Third-Edition/tree/master/Chapter06

Today I am learning about working with notification. One of the biggest advantages of Ansible is its ability, compared to a bash script to notify. The 6 tools which Ansible could easily work with include

  • Email Notification
  • Ansible XMPP/Jabber
  • Slack and Rocket Chat
  • Sending a message to an IRC Channel
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service
  • Nagios

For the full list of notification modules, we can refer to https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.8/modules/list_of_notification_modules.html

Email: 

---
- hosts: localhost 
  connection: local
  tasks: 
    - name: Read the machine uptime 
      command: uptime -p 
      register: uptime 
    - name: Send the uptime via e-mail 
      mail: 
        host: mail.fale.io 
        username: ansible@fale.io 
        password: PASSWORD 
        to: me@fale.io 
        subject: Ansible-report 
        body: 'Local system uptime is {{ uptime.stdout }}.'

To sent the email, we will need the SMTP host, credential and content of the email. Do note that mail modules support the following

  • The attachment parameter: To attach attachments
  • The port parameter: port to use by the email server.

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Working with Roles in Ansible

I have been learning from this book Fabio Alessandro Locati, published under Packt>. The example can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-Ansible-2.X-Third-Edition/tree/master/Chapter04

Today I am learning about working with roles. According to the author, the definition of a role is a set of playbooks, templates, files or variables used to achieve a specific goal. For example, the database role and the web server role can be cleanly separated.

You can see the structure in https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-Ansible-2.X-Third-Edition/tree/master/Chapter04

According to the author, he recommends 3 files in the root folder

  • ansible.cfg: A small configuration file to explain to Ansible where to find the files in the folder structure
  • hosts: host files
  • master.yml: A playbook that aligns the whole infrastructure.

2 more folders

  • playbooks: This will contain the playbooks and a folder called groups for groups management
  • roles: Contain all the roles required.