Clustered Ansible Tower on packet.net

This project was borne out of a need to quickly spin up Ansible Tower clusters for customer demos or to test the latest Tower version.

The tower-packet-lab.yml playbook will:

• Provision an Ansible Tower cluster on https://packet.net/ :
  • 3 clustered Tower instances
    • 2 instance groups
    • 1 isolated Tower instance
    • 1 Postgres instance
• Install the version of Ansible Tower specified by the tower_version variable

Packet.net setup

Visit https://packet.net/:

• Create an account and add a form of payment
• Create a project
• Add a personal or project api key

On your ansible control machine

Install packet-python

pip install packet-python

Update ansible.cfg to point to your vault password file*

[defaults]
inventory      = inventory
host_key_checking = False
vault_password_file = </path/to/your/vault/password/file>
retry_files_enabled = False
[persistent_connection]
command_timeout = 100

*or remove the 'vault_password_file' line if you prefer to supply the password some other way

Update roles/packet-provision/vars/vault.yml with your api key

---
# roles/packet-provision/vars/vault.yml
vaulted_api_token: <your_api_key>

Vault your api key

ansible-vault encrypt roles/packet-provision/vars/vault.yml

Update roles/packet-provision/defaults/main.yml with your project name

---
# roles/packet-provsion/defaults/main.yml
project_name: <your_project_name>

Run it

Provision instances and install Ansible Tower version 3.2.6

ansible-playbook tower-packet-lab.yml

Install a version other than '3.2.6'

ansible-playbook tower-packet-lab.yml --extra-vars tower_version='3.2.1'

Remove your instances

ansible-playbook tower-packet-lab.yml --extra-vars instance_state=absent