ansible-configs

A collection of ansible roles.

This repo is both a set of various roles to mirror my own bash scripts, and my notes on using Ansible for easy reference.

It's structured to be easy to clone, modify, and run only the roles you need. In most cases all you need to change is:

• playbook.yml's roles
• Your preferred inventory/ file's hosts + users

Use whichever inventory format works best for you. The .ini files allow specifying users as inline variables per host, which is useful if each host in a group has different users you'll be connecting as.

Each inventory example connects to the ansible controller (the localhost of the machine you're running ansible from) by default. Modify these files to add your own remote connections.

When you're done, run the playbook with one of the following:

# For using sudo on the remote host, where you aren't using the root account
ansible-playbook -i inventory/inventory.ini [-b] --ask-become-pass -v playbook.yml

# For using the root account on the remote host, typically to deploy and provision cloud resources
ansible-playbook -i inventory/inventory.ini -v playbook.yml

• -b will automatically elevate all tasks so you don't need to specify "become sudo" across every task (don't do this unless you need to)
• --ask-become-pass takes the sudo password for the remote user
• -v will show a useful amount of information without being too verbose

To do: how to specify each remote user's password (if there are multiple remote users listed, each with a unique password).

Setup

Install Ansible:

• Install Ansible via pipx
• pipx: Install
• Install Ansible via pip
• Ensure pip, setuptools, wheel are up to date
• Install pip on Debian/Ubuntu

Ubuntu 23.10+, Fedora:

It's recommended to use pipx.

# Ubuntu
sudo apt update
sudo apt install pipx

# Fedora
sudo dnf install pipx

pipx ensurepath
sudo pipx ensurepath --global # optional to allow pipx actions with --global argument

Install Ansible using pipx:

pipx install --include-deps ansible

Upgrade Ansible:

pipx upgrade --include-injected ansible

Ubuntu 22.04 and Older

If you're missing pip, the recommended way to install it on Ubuntu, or other Debian derivitives is through apt (Ansible's documentation also mentions the python3-pip package):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pip

Install Ansible using pip:

python3 -m pip install --user ansible

Upgrade Ansible:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade --user ansible

Install Multiple Versions

Using pipx you can install multiple versions of packages side by side. This is useful when you want the latest version of a package, and also a specific version of a package on the same system for testing.

To install all of the ansible- tools, you need to specify ansible-core.

version_number="1.2.3"
package_name='ansible-lint' # or ansible-core
pipx install --suffix=_"$version_number" "$package_name"=="$version_number"

Call the version-pinned installation using the suffix:

ansible-lint_1.2.3 --version # If installing ansible-lint==1.2.3
ansible-playbook_1.2.3 --version  # If installing ansible-core==1.2.3

Quick Start: Testing Plays

Creating a playbook

Use this yaml block as a copy-and-paste starting point when developing and testing plays on a single machine "locally" with ansible installed.

This is useful to run only certain parts of a playbook or isolate certain tasks to debug them.

# Write as: playbook.yml
# Run with: ansible-playbook ./playbook.yml
# https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/getting_started/get_started_playbook.html
# https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/inventory_guide/connection_details.html#running-against-localhost
# https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/debug_module.html
- name: Debug Playbook
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  vars:
    user_defined_var: True
  tasks:
    - name: Prints message only if user_defined_var variable is set to True
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: "User defined variable set to: {{ user_defined_var }}"
      when: user_defined_var == True
    - name: Ping localhost
      ansible.builtin.ping:

How Ansible Works

It's important to remember, for example, the ansible.builtin.copy module copies files from the control node to managed nodes, unless remote_src: yes is set.

If remote_src: yes is set, ansible.builtin.copy will only use source paths on the remote host and not the control node.

Basically, all tasks are typically executed on remote targets. This means using ansible.builtin.find + registering a variable + ansible.builtin.copy, to copy arbitrary files from the control node won't work.

In that case, ansible.builtin.find will execute on the remote host, and not find the files. ansible.builtin.copy will attempt to use source paths on the remote host that don't exist instead of paths on the control node, causing this operation to fail.

Variables and Inventories

Currently, most roles in this repo have variables defined in vars/main.yml. This file takes precedence in most cases. Using defaults/main.yml for variables instead allows you to define the default there, and override those defaults in your inventory file(s) on a per-host or per-group level. This note will be removed and changed when all current roles are revised to reflect this.

Example default value for a variable in defaults/main.yml:

some_var: "false"

Ansible has modular ways of approaching and maintaining both, variables and an inventory at the same time.

• Assign variables per-machine
• Assign variables to machine groups

Change some_var to "true" for just one host in your inventory:

10.0.0.40:22 ansible_user=user some_var="true"

Change some_var to "true" for all hosts in a specific inventory group:

[remotegroup]
10.0.0.41:22 ansible_user=user
10.0.0.42:22 ansible_user=user
10.0.0.43:22 ansible_user=user

[remotegroup:vars]
some_var="true"

Finally, be sure your playbook.yml file allows for either all groups, or the groups defined in your inventory file(s). If using all, you must ensure each inventory file has unique definitions to avoid collisions.

- name: "Default Playbook"
  hosts:
    # List groups from your inventory here
    # You could also use the built in "all" or "ungrouped"
    # "all" is necessary when Vagrant is auto-generating the inventory
    all
    #localgroup
    #remotegroup
    #tester_nodes
    #target_nodes
  roles:
  <SNIP>

See the following reference:

• Playbook Variables: Tips on where to set variables

Windows Provisioning

You effectively have two options for opening Windows endpoints to Ansible provisioning:

• WinRM (Domain-Joined, ideally with Kerberos auth, otherwise there's a less secure work around)
• SSH (Best for non-domain-joined endpoints)

There's also PSRemoting over SSH, available to Windows, Linux, and macOS. The PowerShell version installed must be 7.X or later.

Update your inventory.ini file by appending the following options to your Windows endpoints:

• cmd is the default shell for SSH on Windows
• Change this to powershell if you've defined PowerShell as the default SSH login shell
• ansible_become_user is better to be specified per host in the inventory file
• ansible_become_password may be necessary (with LAPS), use an ansible-vault to store these values
• ansible_become_method: runas can be specified per task just like sudo

[remotehosts]
# "Minimum" possible settings, if tasks specify `become_method: runas`
10.55.55.30:22 ansible_user=User ansible_become_user=User ansible_connection=ssh ansible_shell_type=cmd

# Additional settings for password, and become_method
10.55.55.31:22 ansible_user=User ansible_become_user=User ansible_become_password='{{ User_runas_pass }}' ansible_connection=ssh ansible_shell_type=cmd ansible_become_method=runas

Your tasks will have to reflect these kinds of settings as well, using runas instead of sudo when Windows is detected.

See the following references:

• Ansible Privilege Escalation: become Connection Variables
• Ansible Playbook Fails on Windows
• Ansible Playbook Become Error

Execute with:

~/.local/bin/ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -v ./playbook.yml

Ansible-Vault

• ansible-vault
• become-connection-variables
• playbooks-vault

This utility is included with ansible, and allows you to create encyrpted ansible .yml files. It's primarily used for encrypting secrets used for plays, but can even be used to encrypt an entire role.

Create an encrypted file (called a vault):

ansible-vault create vault.yml
# Enter a password, then edit / write the file in the default text editor (vim)

Vault Password File + Environment Variables

In cases where you're running multiple playbooks, it can be tedious to repeatedly enter the vault password. Ansible has a --vault-pass-file option that can read the password from a file. Unfortunately, Ansible doesn't have a built in environment variable you can pass to it for this purpose. Writing this secret in a plaintext file isn't the best idea, and interestingly enough you can specify commands or scripts as the vault-pass-file. This means you can use a similar trick to configuring terraform environment variables and read the vault password from an environment variable.

See these references for a full breakdown, they're summarized below:

• Enter Vault Password Once for Multiple Playbooks
• How to Pass an Ansible Vault a Password
• Get Password from the Environment with curl
• Get Password from Shell Script without Echoing

First, enter the vault password with read:

echo "Enter Vault Password"; read -s vault_pass; export ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD=$vault_pass

• -s hides the text as you type
• The environment variable only appears in the env of that shell session
• It does not appear in the history of that shell
• Another shell running under the same user context cannot see that environment variable without a process dump

Execute with:

ansible-playbook -i <inventory> -e "@~/secrets/auth.yml" --vault-pass-file <(cat <<<$ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD) -v ./playbook.yml

• Uses <(cat <<<$VARIABLE) process substitution and creates a here-string
• The raw value will not appear in your process list
• Using pspy you can verify this
• Be sure kernel.yama.ptrace_scope is set to 1 or higher, as 0 will allow process dumping without root

Use Case: Manage Remote Hosts with Unique Sudo Passwords

This covers the following scenario:

• You have two or more remote hosts with a normal user using sudo instead of root
• You need to update all of them weekly
• You do not want plain text passwords in yaml files
• Each remote host's sudo user has your ssh public key, and only accepts public key authentication

A clear way to manage this and illustrate how this works is by creating a new vault file (we'll call it auth.yml) containing all of the remote user passwords.

ansible-vault create auth.yml
# Specify a vault password, generate and save this to a password manager

The content of auth.yml could look like this:

admin_sudo_pass: 53Zbr3DPpfzGKSbWxNgWareBgNptKt5s
sql_admin_sudo_pass: 3KYRoAndmF53XDu33No7jfsNv2jrrpLi

Then the contents of inventory/inventory.ini could look like this:

10.20.30.40:2222 ansible_user=admin ansible_become_password='{{ admin_sudo_pass }}'
10.20.30.41:2222 ansible_user=sql_admin ansible_become_password='{{ sql_admin_sudo_pass }}'

To execute the playbook, specifying the auth.yml file with -e "@auth.yml", and instead of --ask-become-pass, use --ask-vault-pass. Ansible will check the vaulted auth.yml file for the sudo passwords now instead of expecting them to be passed right after executing this command where typically it will only accept one input string for become_pass, which is the problem this solves.

ansible-playbook -i inventory/inventory.ini --ask-vault-pass --extra-vars "@auth.yml" -v playbook.yml

This can be taken further by also encrypting the usernames as variables in auth.yml.

Ansible-Lint

For guidance on writing Ansible code, reference the Ansible Lint Documentation.

ansible-lint can be used on your playbooks, roles, or collections to check for common mistakes when writing ansible code.

• Installing ansible-lint
• GitHub Action: run-ansible-lint
• GitHub Action: ansible-lint.yml Example

There are a number of ways to do this, but you can install ansible-lint just like ansible.

With pipx:

pipx install ansible-lint

With pipx, using a specific version:

version_number="1.2.3"
package_name='ansible-lint'
pipx install --suffix=_"$version_number" "$package_name"=="$version_number"

With pip:

python3 -m pip install --user ansible-lint

• Configuring ansible-lint

The "new" way to do this, if you also intend to leverage the latest GitHub action in your CI/CD pipeline, is to use a configuration file to specify what ansible-lint should be checking. ansible-lint will look in the current directory, and then ascend directories, until getting to the git project root, looking for one of the following filenames:

• .ansible-lint, this file lives in the project root
• .config/ansible-lint.yml, this file exists within a .config folder
• .config/ansible-lint.yaml, same as the previous file

NOTE: When using the .config/ path, any paths specified in the ansible-lint.yml config file must have ../ prepended so ansible-lint can find them correctly.

The easiest way to start, is with a profile, and excluding the meta/ and tests/ paths in roles. This is a less verbose version of the .ansible-lint file used in this repo.

# .ansible-lint

# Full list of configuration options:
# https://ansible.readthedocs.io/projects/lint/configuring/

# Profiles: null, min, basic, moderate, safety, shared, production
# From left to right, the requirements to pass the profile checks become more strict.
# Safety is a good starting point.
profile: safety

# Shell globs are supported for exclude_paths:
# - https://github.com/ansible/ansible-lint/pull/1425
# - https://github.com/ansible/ansible-lint/discussions/1424
exclude_paths:
  - .cache/      # implicit unless exclude_paths is defined in config
  - .git/        # always ignore
  - .github/     # always ignore
  - "*/tests/"   # ignore tests/ folder for all roles
  - "*/meta/"    # ignore meta/ folder for all roles

# These are checks that may often cause errors / failures.
# If you need to make exceptions for any check, add it here.
warn_list:
  - yaml[line-length]

# Offline mode disables installation of requirements.yml and schema refreshing
offline: true

Over time you may want to shift the profile to shared or production, and also tell ansible-lint to check the tests/ and meta/ paths for each role if you intend to publish them to ansible-galaxy.

Errors

Older versions of ansible-lint may produces errors that are difficult to diagnose. When this happens, use a very simple main.yml file, and start slowly adding tasks or vars to this file. Once you identify a task that creates an error, you can begin narrowing down which line(s) in the task or vars are producing the error.

One example of this is new versions of ansible lint will want you to use become_method: ansible.builtin.sudo, while older versions require become_method: sudo and will generate a schema[tasks] error in this case.

References

This repo was inspired by, and created after learning from IppSec's parrot-build repo and video.