Demo of Ansible for users and groups

Ansible is a tool that automates system administration, such as creating users, installing applications, monitoring connections, etc. This demo shows how to create users and groups, using our preferred approach.

Specifics

The Ansible task does this for each user:

• Track each user with a secure unique id, called a zid.

• Create the user's system user account and corresponding group account.

• Set the user's comment to show the zid, name, email address, and telephone number.

• Create the user's ~/.ssh directory and add the user's SSH authorized key

Preflight

Verify Ansible playbook version is >= 2.5 and is using python >= 3.0

ansible-playbook --version 

Verify Ansible can connect to all our hosts and run an ad hoc command:

ansible all -i hosts.yml -a uptime

Troubleshooting

If Ansible is not using python3, then install it, possibly as root:

sudo su -
source /etc/environment
pip3 install ansible

If yamllint is not available, then install it:

pip3 install yamllint

Starter examples

Example:

ansible-playbook --check -i hosts.yml playbooks/all.yml

Example with paramiko:

ansible-playbook --check -i hosts.yml -c paramiko playbooks/all.yml

What the command does:

• ansible-playbook runs a playbook of tasks
• --check does a dry run
• -i hosts loads our inventory hosts file
• -c paramiko connects using the SSH Paramiko code
• playbooks/all.yml loads our top level file and runs it