Ansible Dev Setup

Provision development devices or virtual machines using Ansible

Requirements

• Ansible (use bootstrap script if needed)

Platforms Supported

Currently only CentOS 7 is tested, but it should also work on Debian & Ubuntu. In the future more distros will be tested for.

Usage

Once the playbook has been configured with your preferred roles and variables, the provision can be initiated by running the following command:

$ ansible-playbook -K playbook.yml

-K is short for telling Ansible to prompt for the user's sudo password, which is required when installing packages, modifying system files and such.

Tasks

The role contains many tasks, each for installing and setting up a specific tool. They are as follows:

Name	Description
golang	Installs the Go programming language and some common packages
jetbrains-toolbox	Installs Jetbrains' Toolbox
vim	Installs Vim, vim-plug and the template .vimrc
vscode	Installs Visual Studio Code
zsh	Installs ZSH, zplug and the template .zshrc

Variables

The role utilises many variables for running, which can be found in defaults/main.yml, but some of the most important for user customisation are:

Name	Description	Default
vimrc_ansible_managed	Determines whether user vim config should be edited	true
vim_plugins	List appended to vim config of plugins for vim-plug	$array
vim_install_plugins	Determines whether to install vim plugins or not	$array
zshrc_ansible_managed	Determines whether user zsh config should be edited	true

Testing and Development

Tests are written in YAML and verified Goss. These tests specify a base state that will be verified after the provision happens in test environments. All tests occur in short-lived Docker containers, orchestrated by Molecule . This allows for provisioning of multiple test environments at once with minimal downtime. (i.e. waiting for VM spinup) Playbooks and tests are also analysed by YAML Lint and Ansible Lint

Testing Requirements

• Docker
• Python
• Molecule

With Python installed Molecule can be installed, with it's dependencies using the following command:

$ pip install pyOpenssl docker molecule

Testing Execution

Tests can now be ran by the following command:

$ molecule test

Setup of the Docker test environments, provisioning and verification can also be ran in seperate steps using molecule setup, molecule converge and molecule verify respectively.

For more options, view the Molecule Docs or run molecule -h