Using Ansible and DigitalOcean to provision TestLab servers

Here's an Ansible playbook that I use to spin up and provision DigitalOcean droplets.

There's a longer article to follow, if you're interested – but the salient points are:

- Spin up the droplets with Ansible's DigitalOcean module

- Put their details into Ansible's "in-memory inventory" with Ansible's add_host module

- Use those details when you provision the droplets with the apt module and more.

I used homebrew to install Ansible 2.1 on my OSX.11 MacBook. I needed to revert to dopy 0.3.5 (there's a bug in the 0.3.7 version that comes with Ansible 2.1)

The playbook below

- uses a custom ssh key where necessary

- keeps the ssh keys and the API out of the main file

- takes an external file of names for the hosts

- avoids irritating known-host checking by setting the following variable for each new server ansible_ssh_common_args='-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no'

- sets up apache / php / git on each server, and uses a jinja2 template to make a unique-ish page on each host.

- takes about 90 seconds per server

- goes with a matching "destroyDroplets.yml" playbook

---

- name: provision servers

  hosts: local

  vars_files:

    - ./vars/droplets.yml

    - ./vars/sensitive.yml

    - ./vars/sshInfo.yml

  tasks:

  - name: Get DigitalOcean's ID of ssh key

    digital_ocean:  #note avoidance of = signs...

      command: ssh

      state: present

      name: "{{ sshInfo.do_ssh_key_name}}"

      api_token: "{{ sensitive.do_token }}"

    register: my_DO_ssh_key

    #

  - name: make droplets, if they don't exist already

    digital_ocean: >

      state=present

      command=droplet

      name={{item.name}}

      unique_name=yes

      size_id=512mb

      region_id=lon1

      image_id=ubuntu-14-04-x64

      ssh_key_ids={{ my_DO_ssh_key.ssh_key.id }}

      api_token={{ sensitive.do_token }}

      wait=yes

    with_items: "{{droplets}}"

    register: droplet_details

    #

  - name: Add named droplet to  group newServers #   variables set user (needed), use right key, stop wretched dialog with known_hosts

    add_host: >

      groupname=newServers

      hostname="{{ item.droplet.ip_address }}"

      ansible_user=root

      ansible_private_key_file="{{sshInfo.local_private_ssh_key}}"

      ansible_ssh_common_args='-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no'

      WPL_server_info="{{item.droplet.name}}"

      otherServers="{{droplet_details.results}}"

    with_items: '{{droplet_details.results}}'

#

- name: set up servers

  hosts: newServers

  tasks:

  - name: install packages

    apt:  >

      name={{item}}

      state=present

      update_cache=yes

    with_items:

      - apache2

      - libapache2-mod-php5

      - git

  - name: remove existing web stuff

    file: >

      path=/var/www/html/index.html

      state=absent

  - name: set up index

    template: src=./siteStuff/index.html dest=/var/www/html/index.html force=yes

  - name: start Apache

    service: name=apache2 state=running enabled=yes

...

If you want to use this, you'll need a DigitalOcean account (get yours here), a DigitalOcean API key, a public/private key pair for ssh (and you'll upload the public one for DigitalOcean to use as you set up, a bunch of configuration files that can be inferred from the playbook, and a template for a web page. Wait about and I'll post them.