Wrap Up

This is the final challenge where you put most of what you have learned together. Your operations and application development teams want to use Ansible automation controller in their environment with specific requirements around web content staging and role-based access.

Let’s set the stage

The teams have put together these requirements:

  • All webservers (node01, node02 and node03) should go in one group.

  • As the webservers can be used for development purposes or in production, there has to be a way to flag them accordingly as "stage dev" or "stage prod".

    • Currently node01 and node03 are used as a development system and node02 is in production.

  • Of course the content of the world famous application "index.html" will be different between dev and prod stages.

    • There should be a title on the page stating the environment

    • There should be a content field

  • The content writer wweb should have access to a survey to change the content for dev and prod servers.

The Git Repository

All code is already in place - this is a automation controller lab after all. Check out the Workshop Project git repository at https://github.com/ansible-tmm/RHEL-workshop-examples. There you will find the playbook apache/webcontent.yml, which calls the role role_webcontent.

Compared to the previous Apache installation role there is a major difference: there are now two versions of an index.html template, and a task deploying the template file which has a variable as part of the source file name:

dev_index.html.j2

<body>
<h1>This is a development webserver, have fun!</h1>
{{ dev_content }}
</body>

prod_index.html.j2

<body>
<h1>This is a production webserver, take care!</h1>
{{ prod_content }}
</body>

main.yml

[...]
- name: Deploy index.html from template
  template:
    src: "{{ stage }}_index.html.j2"
    dest: /var/www/html/index.html
  notify: apache-restart

Prepare Inventory

Navigate to Automation Execution → Infrastructure → Inventories. Select 'Workshop Inventory' and complete the following:

  1. Go to the Groups tab, click the Create group button, and create a new group labeled Webserver.

  2. Within the Variables textbox define a variable labeled stage with the value dev.

    stage: dev

  3. Click Create group.

  4. Within the Webserver group, click the Hosts tab, then click Add existing host. Select node01, node02, node03 as the hosts to be part of the Webserver group.

  5. Within Automation Execution → Infrastructure → Inventories, select the Workshop Inventory. Click on the Hosts tab and click on node02. Select Edit host, and within the Variables textbox define a variable labeled stage with the value of prod and click Save host.

stage: prod

This overrides the inventory variable due to order of operations of how the variables are accessed during playbook execution.

Create the Template

Within Automation Execution → Templates, click the Create template dropdown and select Create job template. Fill as follows:

Parameter Value

Name

Create Web Content

Job Type

Run

Inventory

Workshop Inventory

Project

Workshop Project

Playbook

apache/webcontent.yml

Execution Environment

Default execution environment

Credentials

Workshop Credential | Machine

Variables

dev_content: "default dev content"
prod_content: "default prod content"

Options

✓ Privilege Escalation

Click Create job template.

web_content_job_template

Run the template by selecting Launch template from the template’s kebab menu (⋮) on the Templates list.

Check the Results

Use AAP’s Run Command feature to verify the web content on each node.

  1. Go to Automation Execution → Infrastructure → Inventories → Workshop Inventory and open the Hosts tab.

  2. Select node01, node02, and node03, then click Run Command.

  3. In the Details window, set Module to command and Arguments to curl http://localhost. Click Next.

  4. In the Execution Environment window, select Default execution environment. Click Next.

  5. In the Credential window, select Workshop Credential. Click Next.

  6. Review your inputs and click Finish.

You should see each node return its respective HTML content — development nodes will show "This is a development webserver" and the production node will show "This is a production webserver".

curl output

Add Survey

Add a Survey to the template to allow changing the variables dev_content and prod_content.

In the Template, click the Survey tab, then click the kebab menu (⋮) next to the Survey enabled toggle and select Create survey question.

Fill out the following information:

Parameter Value

Question

What should the value of dev_content be?

Answer Variable Name

dev_content

Answer Type

Text

  • Click Create survey question

In the same fashion add a second Survey Question

Parameter Value

Question

What should the value of prod_content be?

Answer Variable Name

prod_content

Answer Type

Text

  • Click Create survey question

  • Enable the survey by toggling the Survey enabled switch to the on position.

  • Add permissions to the team Web Content so the template Create Web Content can be executed by wweb.

  • Within Automation Execution → Templates, click Create Web Content, select the User Access tab, and click Assign users.

    • Select user(s) → check the box for wweb, click Next.

    • Select roles to apply → check the box for JobTemplate Execute and click Next.

    • Review → click Finish.

  • Run the survey as user wweb

    • Logout of the user admin of your Ansible automation controller.

    • Login as wweb and go to Automation Execution → Templates and run the Create Web Content template.

Once the job completes, log back in as admin and verify the results using Run Command:

  1. Go to Automation Execution → Infrastructure → Inventories → Workshop Inventory and open the Hosts tab.

  2. Select node01, node02, and node03, then click Run Command.

  3. In the Details window, set Module to command and Arguments to curl http://localhost. Click Next.

  4. In the Execution Environment window, select Default execution environment. Click Next.

  5. In the Credential window, select Workshop Credential. Click Next.

  6. Review your inputs and click Finish.

Verify that the updated survey content is reflected in the output for each node.

Congratulations

You finished your labs! We hope you enjoyed your first encounter with Ansible automation controller as much as we enjoyed creating the labs.

Summary

In this exercise you:

  • Created a Webserver inventory group with dev/prod staging variables

  • Built a job template using stage-aware templates for web content

  • Verified dev and prod content was deployed correctly to the right hosts

  • Added a survey for dynamic content input and configured RBAC for the wweb user