---
layout:  post
title:   "Automating setup with ansible-pull part-1"
date:    2019-03-07
tags:    ['ansible', 'ansible-pull', 'linux', 'fedora']
---

Every time that I do a clean install on my machine it takes a few hours till I
get to point where I was before formatting it, install all packages, select
themes, icons, fonts, install IDEs, extensions and so on. After doing it a few
times I came to the conclusion that I would save time by spending time automating this chore, and
as a result, I could tinker a little more with my system and not worry about
spending a weekend re-installing everything (which have happened more time that
I'd like to remember).

<!--more-->

So after a few attempts using python and bash I ended with many files and
keep everything organized and concise turned out to be more tedious than the
setup itself. So there comes [[https://www.ansible.com/][Ansible]]. It is an enterprise-graded software used
to automate tasks. It has A LOT OF features and it can be really helpful if
you're a sysadmin but for now we're going to focus on [[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_intro.html#ansible-pull][Ansible Pull]] and
[[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks.html][Playbooks]]. As better described:

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
[Ansible-Pull] is used to up a remote copy of ansible on each managed node, each
set to run via cron and update playbook source via a source repository. This
inverts the default push architecture of Ansible into a pull architecture, which
has near-limitless scaling potential.

Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language.
They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of
steps in a general IT process.

[[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-pull.html][source]]
#+END_QUOTE

The goal is to pull and run a playbook remotely using a git repository. The
playbook will describe the tasks needed to setup our machine from scratch.

But first lets tinker a bit a with playbooks locally with ~ansible-playbook~, to
do so we need to add ~localhost~ to ansible's hosts list. Add it to
~/etc/ansible/hosts~:

#+BEGIN_SRC service
[all]
localhost
#+END_SRC

As an experiment we're going to write a asks to install vim. Currently, I'm using
[[https://getfedora.org/][Fedora]] thus we going to use [[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/dnf_module.html][dnf modeule]] to install packages, but if you're using
another distribution look for a equivalent module like [[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/apt_module.html][apt module]] for [[https://ubuntu.com/][Ubuntu]].

The playbook to install is quite simple:

#+BEGIN_SRC yaml
# main.yaml
- hosts: all
  tasks:
     - name: install vim
       dnf:
         name: vim
         state: latest
#+END_SRC

~hosts:~ is required and it has to match our hosts otherwise the playbook won't
run.

~tasks:~  is the list of tasks that the playbook will perform, in this case will
be ~dnf install vim~.

To run a playbook use the command ~ansible-playbook~ commando to run
~main.yml~ direct from disk, do to so just run the following command:

#+BEGIN_SRC bash
sudo ansible-playbook --connection=local main.yml
#+END_SRC


After a few seconds, vim will be installed on your machine.

#+BEGIN_SRC
PLAY [all] *************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] *************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [install vim] *****************************************************
ok: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP *************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0
#+END_SRC


This is the first step, next part we shall create a more complex playbook and
setup repository to run it remotely using ~ansible-pull~.