ansible-awx

Ansible is a great tool to automate IT infrastructure, application deployment, configuring the application, and managing & coordinating multiple servers from a single Ansible server.

Ansible is widely used as a command line tool but Ansible Tower and AWX are front-end web application that provides a user interface to manage Ansible playbooks and inventories.
Ansible Tower is an enterprise edition and whereas AWX is open source with a similar feature as Ansible Tower.

Today, we will be setting up the AWX and running a sample playbook. Excited? Let begin

AWX Installation

I have used the vagrant ubuntu 18.04 VM to set up AWX in this tutorial.

Installation

Update the repository and upgrade all the packages
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Please make sure that python 3.6 and greater should be installed.
Install Software properties
apt install software-properties-common
Install Docker

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | apt-key add -
add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
apt install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Install docker-compose

wget https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.11.2/docker-compose-linux-x86_64
chmod +x docker-compose-linux-x86_64
mv docker-compose-linux-x86_64 /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
docker-compose --version

Install Ansible

apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
apt-get update
apt install ansible -y
ansible --version

Install pip and docer-compose

apt install -y python3-pip git pwgen
pip3 install setuptools-rust
pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install docker-compose==1.28.5

Finally, install AWX

wget https://github.com/ansible/awx/archive/17.1.0.zip
apt install unzip
unzip 17.1.0.zip
cd awx-17.1.0/installer/
change admin credential in inventoy file
vi inventory
    admin_user=admin
    admin_password=Test1234

ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml

verify the installation by running docker ps, the following containers should be running

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                COMMAND                  CREATED       STATUS       PORTS                                   NAMES
c9ab2b9ae9ee   ansible/awx:17.1.0   "/usr/bin/tini -- /u…"   3 weeks ago   Up 3 weeks   8052/tcp                                awx_task
423bd411b5c5   ansible/awx:17.1.0   "/usr/bin/tini -- /b…"   3 weeks ago   Up 3 weeks   0.0.0.0:80->8052/tcp, :::80->8052/tcp   awx_web
42008d8517b3   postgres:12          "docker-entrypoint.s…"   3 weeks ago   Up 3 weeks   5432/tcp                                awx_postgres
dcce5a0a8984   redis                "docker-entrypoint.s…"   3 weeks ago   Up 3 weeks   6379/tcp                                awx_redis

Now, you can access the AWX dashboard from the browser using http://<ipaddress> and can log in by providing credentials that have been set in the inventory file during the installation stage

AWX Set up to run playbook

In this tutorial, we will connect to GitHub to retrieve ansible playbooks and other files. We need to set up the credential first to retrieve the files from our GitHub.

set up github credentials
In AWX, Go to Credentials under Resources and click on Add button to add a new credential entry as shown in the screenshots below. Please note that username and password are your GitHub credentials
Create project in AWX To run any playbook, we need to create a project first and the project belongs to an organization. It can be created by Resource->project as shown below:
Create an inventory An inventory contains the target hosts/node details which can be managed from ansible. It can be created by Resource -> Inventories as shown below:

Once the inventory gets created, then we need to attach the host's details in the same inventory as shown below:
Create a template Finally, we need to create a template, which runs our playbook. We need to provide the organization, project, inventory, and playbook details that we have created previously. It can be created by Resources -> Templates as shown below: