Ansible playground to enjoy learning Ansible in a multi Operating System environment.

This playground use Virtualbox and Vagrant to provision virtual machines to have where to play

This environment create five VMs (see Vagrantfile):

• One Centos 6 (hostname centos6)
• One Centos 7 (hostname centos7)
• One Centos 8 (hostname centos8) --> default when execute vagrant up
• One Ubuntu 14.04 (hostname ubuntu1404)
• One Ubuntu 16.04 (hostname ubuntu1604)
• One Ubuntu 18.04 (hostname ubuntu1804)
• One Ubuntu 18.10 (hostname ubuntu1810)
• One Ubuntu 19.04 (hostname ubuntu1904)
• One Debian 8 "Jessie" (hostname debian8)
• One Debian 9 "Stretch" (hostname debian9)
• One Debian 10 "Buster" (hostname debian10)
• One Amazon Linux 2 LTS (hostname amzn2)

All the five VMs could be used together at the same time or in any combination, each one of this has two Network Interfaces:

• One in "nat" mode for internal Vagrant-VirtualBox communication (when you execute vagrant ssh "hostname")
• One in "bridge" mode to your favorite "Host Interface" (This is asked you when VM startup) and where Ansible could work using ssh protocol

Of course, feel free to used it and adapted it to your personal project!, Let me know if you have improvements using Pull Request or creating a new Issue

I'm using Linux Fedora 31 Workstation with the latest updates

Requirements to start play are:

• git
• Visual Studio Code
• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• Python3
• Ansible

sudo dnf install git

sudo rpm --import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[code]\nname=Visual Studio Code\nbaseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscode\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc" > /etc/yum.repos.d/vscode.repo'

dnf check-update
sudo dnf install code

Install vscode plugins

code --install-extension vscoss.vscode-ansible
code --install-extension streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker
code --install-extension yzhang.markdown-all-in-one
code --install-extension bbenoist.vagrant
code --install-extension marcostazi.vs-code-vagrantfile
code --install-extension ms-python.python

I recommend the following link for this work Virtualbox - fedora

sudo wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo
sudo dnf install -y binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms qt5-qtx11extras libxkbcommon
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install VirtualBox-6.0
sudo /usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxdrv.sh setup
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers $USER

check always you are using the last version

sudo dnf install -y https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.2.6/vagrant_2.2.6_x86_64.rpm

Install vagrant-hostmanager

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager

First of all clone this repository from https://github.com/christiangda/ansible-playground

cd ~
mkdir -p ansible-workspace
cd ansible-workspace/
git clone https://github.com/christiangda/ansible-playground.git
cd ansible-playground/

The better way to " isolate the blast radius " -> ;) is using Python Virtual Environments, so create it

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install pylint
pip install rope
pip install autopep8
pip install ansible

As I mentioned before you have five VMs to play for (centos6, centos7, ubuntu1804, ubuntu1810, amzn2, etc), so you can startup altogether or only one, two or three if you prefer

If you want to startup only one

vagrant up ubuntu1804

If you want to play with two, one Ubuntu, one Centos

vagrant up ubuntu1810 centos7 debian9 debian10

To startup the five together, one by one (it take a long time ;), go for a coffee cup) and when you go back your console maybe is asking for the network interface you want to use as a bridge for ansible machines

vagrant up centos6 centos7 centos8 ubuntu1804 ubuntu1810 amzn2

Test if ansible is working fine

ansible all -m ping -o

get hostname of every server

ansible all -m command -a 'hostname -s' -o

More ad-hoc commands

ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_distribution' -o
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_os_family' -o
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_distribution_version' -o
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_distribution_major_version' -o

Testing the first-playbook.yaml

ansible-playbook first-playbook.yaml

if you want to use filter

ansible-playbook first-playbook.yaml --limit centos7,ubuntu1804

Connect to your servers:

vagrant ssh [centos6 | centos7]
# or
vagrant ssh [ubuntu1404 | ubuntu1604 | ubuntu1804 | ubuntu1810]
# or
vagrant ssh [debian8 | debian9]
# or
vagrant ssh amzn2

If you want to know what servers you startup

vagrant status

Deactivate virtual env

deactivate

Stop (in vagrant halt) vagrant Virtual machines

vagrant halt

If you want to stop and destroy vagrant Virtual machines

vagrant destroy -f

This repository code is released under the GNU General Public License Version 3:

• http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html

• Christian González