This repo contains a bunch of useful Ansible roles and playbooks used to setup bare-metal and VM servers the way that I like them. This includes setting up ssh and gnupgp keys, installing packages and copying in preferred configuration settings.

This repo assumes Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy) or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (noble) and we fail gracefully if we detect any hosts that do not meet this criteria.

Use Homebrew you fools!

brew install ansible

Use the packaged version:

sudo apt install ansible

Note that the Ansible that comes as standard in Ubuntu 22.04 is pretty old (2.10.8). You can either us a ppa to install a more recent version or install via pip.

python3 -m pip install ansible

or in the top-level folder for this repo

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

We do not support older versions of Ubuntu at this time.

Install the necessary collections and roles.

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Assuming a remote server has been setup (and you may want to use qemu-minimal to do that) you can enter the target(s) IP address or hostname and port in playbooks/hosts and run something like:

ansible-playbook -i hosts <playbook-name>.yml

Assuming you have setup a basic Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 EC2 instance on AWS you can create a hosts file like this:

[awsmachines]
52.11.127.216
[awsmachines:vars]
root_user=ubuntu
username=batesste

and then run

ansible-playbook -i hosts setup-newmachine.yml --ask-vault-pass

You can then enter your ansible-vault password at the prompt and things should work from there...

There is also a simple bash script that can call ansible-playbook for you. You do not have to use this but if you do want to use it you need to create three local files.

1. A hosts file, call this what you like.
2. sudo-password, a file with the sudo password for the remote user in it. Not all modes of execution need this.
3. vault-password, a file with the ansible-vault password in it. Never check this in! Only some roles need this.

You can then invoke a given playbook with the following

PLAYBOOK=<playbook-file> HOSTS=<host-file> TARGETS=<target-group> ./run-ansible [<extra-args>]

The optional extra-args will be appended to the call to ansible-playbook.

Some of the more involved roles have their own README.md. Please refer to them for more information about a specific role.

This project contains a docker directory that contains a Dockerfile and a bash script that allows simple testing of these playbooks and roles. This is based on this tutorial with some of my own modifications.

You can run a test for any of the roles in this repo by calling the following from the top-level directory of a given role.

MAC_MODE=no CLEAN_UP=yes ../../docker/test-playbook tests/test.yml

This runs the test playbook in the tests/test.yml file using a docker container based on Ubuntu Noble. You can change to MAC_MODE=yes when running on Mac OS X and CLEAN_UP=no if you want to leave the container running for debug purposes.

As this repository has developed we have come across some very useful Ansible commands that we include here for reference.

ansible -m ansible.builtin.setup --tree /tmp/facts -i hosts localmachines

This parses a local inventory file called hosts and gathers facts on all the machines in the localmachines section. It then records those facts in a JSON structure in /tmp/facts/ indexed by target machine name.