Ansible is an open source, agentless automation tool. The DE development team uses Ansible to provision/update our servers and deploy the DE. However, for this repository, we only expose the Ansible scripts that we use for deploying the DE.
If you intend to use our ansible scripts, we highly suggest that you read the Ansible documentation.
We have strived to follow Ansible’s best practices. However, we have slightly diverged on the topics of directory layout and role-separated top level playbooks.
The ansible best practices for directory layout suggests using a group_vars folder, but you may
have noticed that the repo doesn’t contain a ansible/group_vars folder. Our default group_vars
folder resides in the inventories folder;
ansible/inventories/group_vars.
Also, this folder contains a single file, all, which contains all of the variables used by the
provided roles and playbooks with default values.
This is done with the intent that developers will create their own group_vars/all file, which will
override any of the defaults set in the inventories/group_vars/all file.
You only need to include the variables you wish to override.
We maintain role-separated playbooks, but they are kept in the
ansible/playbooks/ folder. The
remaining playbooks in the root of the ansible/ folder are composite (utilize more than one role)
or one off playbooks (do not use any roles).
If you wish to use these playbooks, we have created the single-role.yaml playbook. The documentation on its use is contained within the playbook.
We have provided an example inventory file;
example.cfg. Our
roles and playbooks are written against the host groups in this inventory. Files with a .cfg
extension are ignored by git in the inventories folder. This is done to prevent us from
accidentally exposing our inventories to the public.
The host groups within the example inventory reference the host machines for the DE’s underlying architecture, as well as host groups for the application itself. Each micro-service has a corresponding host group in the inventory.
Refer to the example.cfg file for more info.