The Ansibles

Mainly a (growing) collection of ansible roles I have been writing. I present them here for reuse and educational purposes, since extensive examples are currently sparse, and I would've benefited from these when I started out. I hope they'll benefit others now. They're targetted and tested for Ubuntu (precise), so might not work on all systems (at least not out of the box).

I have a couple of other ones, and will update the repository when I manage to clean them up. Meanwhile, feel free to send in pull requests with fixes, updates, new roles. I'll happily review and add them.

Some of the roles require some configuration (pre- or post-), so I added some documentation. Do check these out if you don't want to waste time.

Roles included

Ordered alphabetically. Some have instructions (so RTFM).

Role	Contents
apt	updates the aptitude sources list, updates the cache, and upgrades all packages
auth	setting up users and groups
build	makes sure essential build/make/config/compiler packages (g++, build-essential, automake, ack, ...) are installed
cassandra	installs & configures Cassandra
clojure	installs the clojure language binaries
common	runs over dependency roles (hostname, timezone, directories, apt, vim, build, cron, logwatch, tmpreaper, ssh, powerdns) and installs a set of tools to help you manage a server (curl, debconf, dmidecode, htop, iftop, iotop, nmap, tshark, tmux, mosh, ...)
cron	installs cron
directories	makes sure 'default' and 'additional' directories, and their auth settings, are present
elasticsearch	installs & configures elasticsearch
firewall	installs & configures ferm - don't forget to update /etc/ferm/ferm.conf
jdk	installs Oracle JDK binaries
kafka	installs & configures apache kafka
mail	installs & configures a full-featured mailserver with SMTP over SSL via Postfix, IMAP over SSL via Dovecot, Full-text search in your imbox powered by solr, DNSBLs to redirect spam even before it hits your filters, DSPAM and Postgrey for spam-fencing and OpenDKIM mail server verification
maven	installs the Maven build manager for JVM language projects
monit	installs & configures monit
mysql	installs, configures & hardens MySql
netatalk	installs & configures netatalk
nginx	installs & configures nginx - You can choose to install it through a package, or build it from source, and fine-tune which modules to ex/include
nodejs	installs nodejs - You can choose to install it through a package, or build it from source
powerdns	installs & the configures powerdns dns recursor
python	installs python & dependencies (python, python-dev, libevent-dev, cython, python3)
scala	installs the Scala language binaries
security	installs & configures fail2ban, rkhunter and lynis
ssh	configures (hardens!) the machines ssh
ssl	moves (wildcard) ssl certificates to the host
storm	(common, drpc, nimbus, supervisor) installs & configures twitter storm
supervisor	installs & configures supervisord
timezone	sets the systems timezone
tmpreaper	installs and configures [tmpreaper]
vim	makes sure the 'right' version of vim is installed and configured
vpn	installs & configures OpenVPN
zeromq	installs ØMQ socket library
znc	installs & configures ZNC IRC bouncer
zookeeper	installs & configures Zookeeper

Requirements

• ansible > 1.3, and it's dependencies

Contrib

Cloudbox

Inspired by inspired by Drew Crawford's post, and al3x's sovereign repo, I have created a similarly complete set that gives you a personal (mail/web/...)server.

The set-up of the scripts are different (mainly because I recycled what I had + I have a slightly different approach so I there is a better fallback mechanism for default values), as is the content of what it installs (nginx instead of apache, no owncloud due to some nasty experiences with it in the past, ...)

I took the time to write a complete tutorial, which should get you up and running very quickly (the manual work is really limited to an absolute minimum).

Vagrant

As a second example, everything is configured to work with vagrant (precise64) 'testbox' on 192.168.111.111. There's a Vagrantfile included in contrib/vagrant/ for this configuration.

Try it out:

1. edit the contrib/vagrant/Vagrantfile, contrib/vagrant/auth_vars, and host_vars/192.168.111.111 to your liking
2. vagrant up
3. ansible-playbook -i vagrant vagrant.yml --sudo

contrib/deprecated?

Scripts I've written, yet don't consider that useful to myself. Mainly here for reference purposes. Happy if they're useful to others.

Using the-ansibles as a role library

Ansible 1.4 introduced the roles_path environment variable (See Ansible configuration docs on roles_path). This allows for the-ansibles to be used as a library of roles. Clone the repository as normal, then set roles_path in your ansible.cfg to the roles subdirectory of the-ansibles something like this:

roles_path= /path/to/the-ansibles/roles

And use the roles in playbooks as normal. Roles in your playbook directory will override those with the same name in the-ansibles allowing for selective overrides where required.

Thanks

To all contributors:

• Adrian Simmons
• Greg Tangey
• Tim Vandecasteele

Feedback, bug-reports, requests, ...

Are welcome! Everyone benefits, really...