Find security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and infrastructure misconfigurations early in the development cycle of your infrastructure-as-code with KICS by Checkmarx.
KICS stands for Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure, it is open source and is a must-have for any cloud native project.
Ansible Lint is a command-line tool for linting playbooks, roles and collections aimed towards any Ansible users. Its main goal is to promote proven practices, patterns and behaviors while avoiding common pitfalls that can easily lead to bugs or make code harder to maintain.
Ansible lint is also supposed to help users upgrade their code to work with newer versions of Ansible. Due to this reason we recommend using it with the newest version of Ansible, even if the version used in production may be older.
As any other linter, it is opinionated. Still, its rules are the result of community contributions and they can always be disabled based individually or by category by each user.
Ansible Galaxy project makes use of this linter in order to compute quality scores for Galaxy Hub contributed content. This does not mean this tool is aimed only to those that want to share their code. Files like galaxy.yml, or sections like galaxy_info inside meta.yml help with documentation and maintenance, even for unpublished roles or collections.
The project was originally started by @willthames, and has since been adopted by the Ansible Community team. Its development is purely community driven, while keeping permanent communications with other Ansible teams.
Using Ansible content that depends on non-default dependencies can be tricky. Packages must be installed on each node, play nicely with other software installed on the host system, and be kept in sync.
To help simplify this process, we have introduced the concept of Execution Environments, which you can create with Ansible Builder.
Ansible Builder is a tool that automates the process of building execution environments using the schemas and tooling defined in various Ansible Collections and by the user.
Hello and welcome to another introductory Ansible blog post, where we'll be covering a new command-line interface (CLI) tool, Ansible Builder. Please note that this article will cover some intermediate-level topics such as containers (Ansible Builder uses Podman by default), virtual environments, and Ansible Content Collections. If you have some familiarity with those topics, then read on to find out what Ansible Builder is, why it was developed, and how to use it.
This project is currently in development upstream on GitHub and is not yet part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product. As with all Red Hat software, our code is open and we have an open source development model for our enterprise software. The goal of this blog post is to show the current status of this initiative, and start getting the community and customers comfortable with our methodologies, thought process, and concept of Execution Environments. Feedback on this upstream project can be provided on GitHub via comments and issues, or provided via the various methods listed on our website. There is also a great talk on AnsibleFest.com, titled “Creating and Using Ansible Execution Environments,” available on-demand, which can provide additional clarification.
s part of a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription, customers have access to supported versions of on-premise packages, as well as hosted services provided on console.redhat.com. Red Hat provides a published product life cycle for Ansible Automation Platform so that customers and partners can properly plan, deploy, support, and maintain their on-premise automation clusters as well as hosted services that they use as part of the Ansible Automation Platform subscription.
This life cycle encompasses stated time periods for each version of Ansible Automation Platform, which is a logical grouping of many individual product components. The life cycle for each version of Ansible Automation Platform is split into production phases, each identifying the various levels of maintenance over a period of time from the initial release date. While multiple versions of Ansible Automation Platform may be supported at any one time, note that this life cycle applies to each specific version of Ansible Automation Platform and does not apply to (for example) the 1.x or 2.x major version as a whole. That is, semantic versioning rules are not used as part of Ansible Automation Platform releases (but specific contained components may).
Customers are expected to upgrade their Ansible Automation Platform environments to the most current supported version of the product in a timely fashion. Features and bug fixes target only the latest versions of the product, though some allowance may be given for high security risk items.
This article describes one approach to setting up a GitLab CI/CD pipeline for testing and deploying Ansible content.
ARA Records Ansible (github/ansible-community/ara) and makes it easier to understand and troubleshoot.
It’s another recursive acronym.
What it does
Simple to install and get started, ara provides reporting by saving detailed and granular results of ansible and ansible-playbook commands wherever you run them:
- by hand or from a script
- from a laptop, a desktop, a container or a server
- for development, CI or production
- from a linux distribution or even on OS X (as long as you have python >= 3.5)
- from tools such as AWX or Tower, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Rundeck, Zuul, Molecule, ansible-pull, ansible-test or ansible-runner
An Ansible AWX operator for Kubernetes built with Operator SDK and Ansible.
@abstractmethod
def run(self, terms, variables=None, **kwargs):
"""
When the playbook specifies a lookup, this method is run. The
arguments to the lookup become the arguments to this method. One
additional keyword argument named variables is added to the method
call. It contains the variables available to ansible at the time the
lookup is templated. For instance::
"{{ lookup('url', 'https://toshio.fedorapeople.org/one.txt', validate_certs=True) }}"
would end up calling the lookup plugin named url's run method like this::
run(['https://toshio.fedorapeople.org/one.txt'], variables=available_variables, validate_certs=True)
Lookup plugins can be used within playbooks for looping. When this
happens, the first argument is a list containing the terms. Lookup
plugins can also be called from within playbooks to return their
values into a variable or parameter. If the user passes a string in
this case, it is converted into a list.
Errors encountered during execution should be returned by raising
AnsibleError() with a message describing the error.
Any strings returned by this method that could ever contain non-ascii
must be converted into python's unicode type as the strings will be run
through jinja2 which has this requirement. You can use::
from ansible.module_utils._text import to_text
result_string = to_text(result_string)
"""
pass
It’s vital to test new technology before rolling it out into your production environment. I like to use Python virtual environments provided by the venv module for developing and testing Ansible playbooks and features. Instead of using the default Python and Ansible commands installed on your system, you can easily set up multiple Python environments and test different versions of Ansible and its component libraries.
Virtual environments are like a virtual machine or Linux chroot, but they create an isolated structure of lightweight directories separated from actual Python system directories. That means you can have different sets of Python environments, each with different versions of modules, files, or configurations.
Ansible is based on Python and leverages many Python modules and plugins. When you test something new, it could require you to update a module that your Ansible installation depends on. Upgrading a component that your production environment depends on defeats the purpose of testing. Still, you can have different versions of Ansible and other important Python modules in a dedicated test directory with a virtual environment.
Ansible Tower 3.0 and later uses virtualenv. Virtualenv creates isolated Python environments to avoid problems caused by conflicting dependencies and differing versions. Virtualenv works by simply creating a folder which contains all of the necessary executables and dependencies for a specific version of Python. Ansible Tower creates two virtualenvs during installation–one is used to run Tower, while the other is used to run Ansible. This allows Tower to run in a stable environment, while allowing you to add or update modules to your Ansible Python environment as necessary to run your playbooks. For more information on virtualenv, see the Python Guide to Virtual Environments and the Python virtualenv project itself.
By default, the virtualenv is located at /var/lib/awx/venv/ansible on the file system but starting with Ansible Tower 3.5, you can create your own custom directories and use them in inventory imports. This allows you to choose how you run your inventory imports, as inventory sources use custom virtual environments.
Tower also pre-installs a variety of third-party library/SDK support into this virtualenv for its integration points with a variety of cloud providers (such as EC2, OpenStack, Azure, etc.) Periodically, you may want to add additional SDK support into this virtualenv, which is described in further detail below.
This repo hosts the openstack.cloud Ansible Collection.
The collection includes the Openstack modules and plugins supported by Openstack community to help the management of Openstack infrastructure.
NOTE: This solution should only be used in non-production environments as a method to get familiar with Ansible. For production use, I recommend installing Ansible on a dedicated Linux server.
An automated deployment tool is a must have for any IT environment. In my lab, that’s Ansible. I’ve used Ansible in my lab to automate VM deployment/destruction, adding SSH keys for remote access to my servers, joining/leaving AD domain, and monitoring the newly deployed VMs. This is very useful as I frequently deploy/destroy VMs for testing a specific use case.
For a Windows admin, Ansible can seem daunting… For one, it runs on linux. Second, it’s based off of Python. I’m here to tell you, it’s not that difficult. In fact, did you know that Ansible is one of the few configuration management tools out there that can easily/natively use PowerShell code?
In this post, I’m going to review the steps involved in getting Ansible installed & running on Windows Server 2019. While install times may vary due to lab resources and internet speed, I’m able to complete the steps outlined below for installing Ansible in a little over 20 minutes.
This Ansible playbook is meant to help you run your own Matrix homeserver, along with the various services related to that.
That is, it lets you join the Matrix network using your own @<username>:<your-domain> identifier, all hosted on your own server (see prerequisites).
We run all services in Docker containers (see the container images we use), which lets us have a predictable and up-to-date setup, across multiple supported distros (see prerequisites) and architectures (x86/amd64 being recommended).
Installation (upgrades) and some maintenance tasks are automated using Ansible (see our Ansible guide).
Ansible modules contain documentation in form of YAML blocks documenting the parameters, examples and return values of the module. The Ansible documentation site is built using Sphinx from reStructuredText. As the modules don't contain reStructuredText, Ansible hashad a tool to generate it from the documentation YAML: build-ansible.py document-plugins. The tool and the accompanying libraries are not part of the Ansible distribution - they just live in the hacking directory. To run them we need a git checkout of Ansible and source hacking/env-setup to set PYTHONPATH and a few other variables correctly for Ansible to run directly from that checkout.
Molecule project is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles.
Molecule provides support for testing with multiple instances, operating systems and distributions, virtualization providers, test frameworks and testing scenarios.
Molecule encourages an approach that results in consistently developed roles that are well-written, easily understood and maintained.
Molecule supports only the latest two major versions of Ansible (N/N-1), meaning that if the latest version is 2.9.x, we will also test our code with 2.8.x.
Once installed, the command line can be called using any of the methods below:
molecule
Heute läuft der Server mit Ubuntu 20.04. Darauf laufen keine LXC/LXD Container mehr. Stattdessen läuft jetzt Kubernetes darauf. Zu Beginn nutzte ich für die Installation von Kubernetes Kubespray ein, das Standard-Kubernetes war allerdings deutlich zu fett. Größtes Manko war, dass das etcd verdammt viel auf die SSD geschrieben hat und ich regelmäßig bei jedem Upgrade das Setup kaputt gespielt habe. Für den Privatgebrauch ergab das so daher keinen Sinn.
Mittlerweile setze ich auf das vergleichsweise schlanke k3s.io. Das braucht im Heimbetrieb deutlich weniger Leistung und erledigt trotzdem das, was ich brauche. Statt etcd setzt es auf sqlite und statt Docker auf containerd.
If you have questions, check the documentation at kubespray.io and join us on the kubernetes slack, channel #kubespray. You can get your invite here
Can be deployed on AWS, GCE, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere, Packet (bare metal), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Experimental), or Baremetal
Highly available cluster
Composable (Choice of the network plugin for instance)
Supports most popular Linux distributions
Continuous integration testsA lot of folks may ask about how variables override another. Ultimately it’s Ansible’s philosophy that it’s better you know where to put a variable, and then you have to think about it a lot less.