Creating an instance with Ansible

In this tutorial I'm going to show an example of how to start a server and run an apache2 webserver on Leafcloud, using Ansible.

Install ansible

you can use te package manager of your linux distribution

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt install ansible

On RHEL or similar:

sudo dnf install ansible

pip can be used on any operating system:

pip install ansible

Install the openstack.cloud collection

To be able to create a server on Leafcloud you will need an extra module collection

ansible-galaxy collection install openstack.cloud

Create your playbooks

The following playbook create-server.yaml will create:

• A security group for http
• A security group rule for http
• An ec1.small VM instance

---
  - name: Create a new instance and attaches it to a network, and passes the metadata to the instance
    hosts: localhost
    connection: local
    tasks:
      - name: Create an http security group
        openstack.cloud.security_group:
          state: present
          name: http-hello-world
          description: security group for http
      - name: Create a security group rule for http
        openstack.cloud.security_group_rule:
          security_group: http-hello-world
          protocol: tcp
          port_range_min: 80
          port_range_max: 80
          remote_ip_prefix: 0.0.0.0/0
      - name: Create the server
        openstack.cloud.server:
          state: present
          name: test-ansible
          image: 0e98efbf-de1e-4e58-bf77-1ca80668e305
          key_name: my_key
          timeout: 200
          flavor: ec1.small
          nics:
            - net-name: external
          security_groups:
            - http-hello-world
            - default
          boot_from_volume: yes
          volume_size: 20
      - name: get ip address of created server
        openstack.cloud.server_info:
          server: test-ansible
        register: result
      - name: Output the ip address
        debug:
          msg: "{{ result.openstack_servers[0].addresses.external[0].addr }}"

For installing apache2 you can make a playbook install-apache2.yaml

---
  - name: Install apache
    hosts: test-ansible
    become: true
    tasks:
      - name: install apache2
        apt:
          name: apache2
          update_cache: yes
          state: present

For the cleanup you can make the following playbook cleanup.yaml

  - name: Clean up server and security group
    hosts: localhost
    connection: local
    tasks:
      - name: Remove the server
        openstack.cloud.server:
          name: test-ansible
          state: absent
      - name: Remove http security group
        openstack.cloud.security_group:
          state: absent
          name: http-hello-world
      - name: Remove security group rule for http
        openstack.cloud.security_group_rule:
          security_group: http-hello-world
          state: absent

Running your playbooks

You will start with create-server.yaml

ansible-playbook create-server.yaml

This will create a VM and output its ip address. Copy the ip address and create your inventory file:

test-ansible  ansible_host=<ip-address> ansible_user=ubuntu

Replace <ip-address> with the ip address of your server and save the file.

Now you are ready to install apache2:

ansible-playbook -i inventory install-apache2.yaml

That's it, you can now type the ip address of your server into your favorire browser, and you'll see the welcome page of apache2.

Cleanup

To remove the instance and the security groups you've jsut created you can run:

ansible-playbook create-server.yaml cleanup.yaml

This will remove any security group and rule named http-hello-world in your project. It will also remove any server in your project named test-ansible