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A collection of Software and Cloud patterns with a focus on the Enterprise

Build a Multi-server LEMP stack using Ansible

My objective in this post is to explore the use of Ansible to configure a multi-server LEMP stack. This builds on the preliminary work I did demonstrating how to use Vagrant to create an environment to run Ansible. You can follow this entire example on any Windows (or Linux) host.

Ansible only runs on Linux hosts, not Windows. As a result, I needed to provision one Linux host to act as Ansible controller. One aspect of Ansible that I wanted to explore is the ability to manage multiple hosts with different configurations. For this experiment, I provision two more Linux hosts, one to act as a database host and the other to function as an Nginx/PHP server for a complete LEMP stack. I created the diagram below to illustrate my setup.

vagrant-ansible-lemp

There are two primary artifact categories for this experiement:

  • Vagrantfile to provision each host
  • Ansible playbook related files

Since there were more than a few Ansible playbook files, I chose to create a github repository rather than provide all the code here. You can clone/fork the files to run this experiment here:

https://github.com/dwatrous/vagrant-ansible-lemp

Explanation

Here is a list of the files you’ll find in that repository.

  • Vagrantfile
  • control.sh
  • lemp/group_vars/all
  • lemp/hosts
  • lemp/roles/common/handlers/main.yml
  • lemp/roles/common/tasks/main.yml
  • lemp/roles/database/handlers/main.yml
  • lemp/roles/database/tasks/main.yml
  • lemp/roles/web/handlers/main.yml
  • lemp/roles/web/tasks/main.yml
  • lemp/roles/web/templates/default
  • lemp/roles/web/templates/wall.php
  • lemp/site.yml

I do use a bootstrap shell script, control.sh, with Vagrant for the Ansible control server. It is necessary to install Ansible on the control server, but since Ansible doesn’t require an agent, there’s no need to bootstrap the other servers.

Playbook files

For each Ansible defined role there are three artifact categories.

  • handlers
  • tasks
  • templates

Handlers are named tasks that can be called or notified when Ansible detects other events. These are commonly used to trigger service restarts when configuration files change, as an example.

Tasks are the meat of the playbook. This lists out the steps to put a system into a desired state, including installing software, copying templates, registering and calling handlers, etc.

Configuration files, such as the nginx ‘default’ configuration in this case, can be stored in the templates folder and copied to the host using a task. Templates are helpful when a desired configuration differs significantly from a system default, this can be easier than updating individual lines in a file one at a time using lineinfile. The Ansible playbook files are in the following directory.

/vagrant/lemp

The site.yml file ties it all together by associating host groups with roles. You run the playbook like this.

ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

The example wall.php script should be accessible locally using the port 80->8080 mapping as http://127.0.0.1:8080/wall.php or over port 80 on the external IP assigned to the web host. Here’s what you can expect to see.

ansible-wall-example

Resources

I used the ansible examples repository on Github while putting this together. You may find it useful. For the specifics of installing LEMP on Ubuntu, I followed my Vagrant tutorial.

Comments

  1. […] administrators began to pursue more automation to accommodate the setup of these systems (e.g. ansible, puppet, chef and even Vagrant). This made it possible to think of systems as more transient. With […]

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