Ansible Playbook

Ansible streamlines the management of systems by using playbooks, which are essentially automation plans in YAML format. These playbooks offer repeatable, reusable, simple configuration management and are a great tool for guaranteeing identical final system states regardless of machine or user. In our use case this means that we can provide a playbook to take care of all of the setup and initialization required for the Girder data management platform that will serve as our database.

In order to run the playbook you will first need to make Girder available.

Run with Docker (recommended)

Requirements

docker pull kitware/esimmon-ansible:latest

Start the container

Ansible cannot be started without the Girder container.

cd <repo>/devops/docker
docker-compose -p esimmon -f docker-compose.girder.yml -f docker-compose.ansible.yml up

Run Locally

Requirements

Install Ansible

pip install ansible

Install the requirements

cd {path-to-repo}/devops/ansible
ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Set the ANSIBLE_LIBRARY environment variable. This should be colon separated paths to tell Ansible where to search for Modules.

export ANSIBLE_LIBRARY=~/.ansible/roles/girder/library

Run the playbook

The -i flag is shorthand for --inventory and points to the specify inventory host path. The site.yml is the actual playbook that will be used.

ansible-playbook -i localhost site.yml

Extra variables can be passed in if needed. For example, if setting up the SMTP server you should set the variables in ../docker/.env and pass them in when running the playbook. You will need to uncomment lines 86-130.

ansible-playbook -i localhost \
-e admin_password=$ADMIN_PASSWORD \
-e smtp_host=$SMTP_HOST \
-e smtp_username=$SMTP_USERNAME \
-e smtp_password=$SMTP_PASSWORD \
-e email_from=$EMAIL_FROM \
-e email_host=$EMAIL_HOST \
site.yml

Developing/Updating the playbook

If you would like to customize your Girder configuration you can add or remove tasks from {path-to-repo}/devops/ansible/site.yml. See the documentation for detailed information on creating playbook tasks.