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Using Ansible to set up a workstation
Ansible is an extremely popular open-source configuration management and software automation project. While IT professionals almost certainly use Ansible on a daily basis, its influence outside the IT industry is not as wide. Ansible is a powerful and flexible tool. It is easily applied to a task common to nearly every desktop computer user: the post-installation “checklist”.
Most users like to apply one “tweak” after a new installation. Ansible’s idempotent, declarative syntax lends itself perfectly to describing how a system should be configured.
Ansible in a nutshell
The ansible program itself performs a single task against a set of hosts. This is roughly conceptualized as:
for HOST in $HOSTS; do
ssh $HOST /usr/bin/echo "Hello World"
done
To perform more than one task, Ansible defines the concept of a “playbook”. A playbook is a YAML file describing the state of the targeted machine. When run, Ansible inspects each host and performs only the tasks necessary to enforce the state defined in the playbook.
- hosts: all
tasks:
- name: Echo "Hello World"
command: echo "Hello World"
Run the playbook using the ansible-playbook command:
$ ansible-playbook ~/playbook.yml
Configuring a workstation
Start by installing ansible:
dnf install ansible
Next, create a file to store the playbook:
touch ~/post_install.yml
Start by defining the host on which to run this playbook. In this case, “localhost”:
- hosts: localhost
Each task consists of a name field and a module field. Ansible has a lot of modules. Be sure to browse the module index to become familiar with all Ansible has to offer.
The package module
Most users install additional packages after a fresh install, and many like to remove some shipped software they don’t use. The package module provides a generic wrapper around the system package manager (in Fedora’s case, dnf ).
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Install Builder
become: yes
package:
name: gnome-builder
state: present
- name: Remove Rhythmbox
become: yes
package:
name: rhythmbox
state: absent
- name: Install GNOME Music
become: yes
package:
name: gnome-music
state: present
- name: Remove Shotwell
become: yes
package:
name: shotwell
state: absent
This playbook results in the following outcomes:
- GNOME Builder and GNOME Music are installed
- Rhythmbox is removed
- On Fedora 28 or greater, nothing happens with Shotwell (it is not in the default list of packages)
- On Fedora 27 or older, Shotwell is removed
This playbook also introduces the become: yes directive. This specifies the task must be run by a privileged user (in most cases, root ).
The DConf Module
Ansible can do a lot more than install software. For example, GNOME includes a great color-shifting feature called Night Light. It ships disabled by default, however the Ansible dconf module can very easily enable it.
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Enable Night Light
dconf:
key: /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/color/night-light-enabled
value: true
- name: Set Night Light Temperature
dconf:
key: /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/color/night-light-temperature
value: uint32 5500
Ansible can also create files at specified locations with the copy module. In this example, a local file is copied to the destination path.
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Enable "AUTH_ADMIN_KEEP" for pkexec
become: yes
copy:
src: files/51-pkexec-auth-admin-keep.rules
dest: /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/51-pkexec-auth-admin-keep.rules
The Command Module
Ansible can still run commands even if no specialized module exists (via the aptly named command module). This playbook enables the Flathub repository and installs a few Flatpaks. The commands are crafted in such a way that they are effectively idempotent. This is an important behavior to consider; a playbook should succeed each time it is run on a machine.
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Enable Flathub repository
become: yes
command: flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
- name: Install Fractal
become: yes
command: flatpak install --assumeyes flathub org.gnome.Fractal
- name: Install Spotify
become: yes
command: flatpak install --assumeyes flathub com.spotify.Client
Combine all these tasks together into a single playbook and, in one command, ** Ansible will customize a freshly installed workstation. Not only that, but 6 months later, after making changes to the playbook, run it again to bring a “seasoned” install back to a known state.
$ ansible-playbook -K ~/post_install.yml
This article only touched the surface of what’s possible with Ansible. A follow-up article will go into more advanced Ansible concepts such as roles, configuring multiple hosts with a divided set of responsibilities.
via: https://fedoramagazine.org/using-ansible-setup-workstation/
作者：Link Dupont 选题：lujun9972 译者：译者ID 校对：校对者ID