Ansible

A series of articles about configuration managment at the example of Ansible.

By using a configuration management tool, the procedure necessary for bringing up a new server or updating an existing one will be all documented in the provisioning scripts.

Terms

• Inventory stores information about your servers as INI file
• Playbook is the entry point for Ansible provisionings (imagine it as a set of tasks)
• Task defines a single procedure to be executed, e.g. updating the package cache
• Module typically is a abstraction of a system task (more generalized task?)
• Role is used to organize playbooks and other files for reuse
• Play names a complete provision process, from start to finish
• Facts are variables containing information about the system, e.g. OS, hostname etc.
• Handlers trigger service status changes

Services

The following list of services should be configured and deployed automatically:

• caddy
• gitea
• prometheus
• grafana
• jupyter
• postgres
• pgweb
• netdata, node_exporter