Ansible is a strange beast, and the best way to learn it is little by little every day. This course has short lessons, one for each day, for a total of about two weeks. You will need to work 15–30 minutes on each lesson. This is the first one.
We will be running Ansible on your local machine (which we will use to control a server), so first of all you need to install Ansible.
Ansible runs only on Unixlike machines, so your local machine must be running Mac OS X or GNU/Linux or similar. If your laptop runs Windows, please read the section about Windows further below.
Here is how to install Ansible on a virtualenv on a Debian or Ubuntu machine:
apt install ansibleIf you prefer to install it with pip, here is a way:
apt install python3-paramiko python3-jinja2 python3-yaml
mkvirtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 --system-site-packages ansible-course
pip install ansibleI don’t know how to do it on Mac OS X, but it shouldn’t be difficult
to do the equivalent of the above commands. It’s fine if you install
jinja2 and yaml with pip, but paramiko can be tricky
(because of its crypto dependencies), so it’s better if you install a
system package.
To verify that it has been installed, enter ansible --help; it should
give you a usage message.
Ansible runs only on Unixlike machines. If you have Windows, you must install a GNU/Linux virtual machine (e.g. using Virtualbox), or use the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), or Docker Desktop, or similar.
During the course, you will be editing files a lot. You will be creating files, creating directories, renaming files and directories, copying stuff from one file to another, and so on. It will be really better if you do this in your favorite editor, and be graphically viewing the directory tree if you are accustomed to that. So logging into your virtual machine and working in there with vim is really suboptimal (unless this is the way you commonly work). It’s probably better if you work in a directory shared with Windows, in which case you will do all editing and file management in Windows, and use the virtual machine only in order to execute Ansible. So go ahead and create this shared directory and make sure you can access it both from Windows and from the virtual machine.
During the course we will be installing Ansible on a Ubuntu 22.04 server. You will need to create one. I like creating test servers on Hetzner but you can use any service you like, or even setup a virtual machine on your local machine if you feel comfortable (if you do it locally you may need to create some tricky NAT configuration; I've chosen to stay away from all that and use Hetzner instead). A 1-GB-RAM server is fine.
If, like Hetzner, your virtual server is charged by the hour, it's fine to destroy it after each lesson and recreate it before the next one.
To avoid typing passwords, it will be really better to use ssh keys to login. If you have difficulty doing this, my Deploying Django book demystifies it in the first chapter.
One of the things we will learn in the course is reading the Ansible
library reference. In order to make that easy, please create a
quicksearch in your browser with keyword “ansible” and URL
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/%s_module.html
(if you don't understand what I'm talking about please read An easy tip
to quickly access the Python reference).
You must have clear understanding of virtualenv, particularly of the
fact that it does nothing more than alter the system path and the python
path. If this is not entirely clear to you, please read virtualenv
demystified.
We will be deploying Django with nginx, gunicorn and systemd, essentially following this cheat sheet. In order to be able to concentrate on Ansible, it will be best if you have at least a general understanding of it. If it looks too mysterious, you might want to pause learning Ansible and instead read the Deploying Django book, then come back here.
Finally, we will be practicing with a specific Django application, greeter. Get a quick overview of greeter by reading its README.
This is all for today. Tomorrow we will start configuring Ansible and check that it can connect to the server.