Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Creator Guide

The following list shows the arrangements and uses of tools available on Ansible Automation Platform 2.0, along with how they can be utilized:

Playbooks are files written in YAML that contain specific sets of human-readable instructions, or “plays”, that you send to run on a single target or groups of targets.

Playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines, as well as sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates. Use playbooks to delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way. Once written, playbooks can be used repeatedly across your enterprise for automation.

A role is Ansible’s way of bundling automation content as well as loading related vars, files, tasks, handlers, and other artifacts automatically by utilizing a known file structure. Instead of creating huge playbooks with hundreds of tasks, you can use roles to break the tasks apart into smaller, more discrete and composable units of work.

You can find roles for provisioning infrastructure, deploying applications, and all of the tasks you do every day on Ansible Galaxy. Filter your search by Type and select Role. Once you find a role that you’re interested in, you can download it by using the ansible-galaxy command that comes bundled with Ansible:

ansible-galaxy role install username.rolename

$ ansible-galaxy role install username.rolename

An Ansible Content Collection is a ready-to-use toolkit for automation. It includes multiple types of content such as playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins all in one place. The diagram below shows the basic structure of a collection:

collection/
├── docs/
├── galaxy.yml
├── meta/
│   └── runtime.yml
├── plugins/
│   ├── modules/
│   │   └── module1.py
│   ├── inventory/
│   ├── lookup/
│   ├── filter/
│   └── .../
├── README.md
├── roles/
│   ├── role1/
│   ├── role2/
│   └── .../
├── playbooks/
│   ├── files/
│   ├── vars/
│   ├── templates/
│   ├── playbook1.yml
│   └── tasks/
└── tests/
    ├── integration/
    └── unit/

collection/
├── docs/
├── galaxy.yml
├── meta/
│   └── runtime.yml
├── plugins/
│   ├── modules/
│   │   └── module1.py
│   ├── inventory/
│   ├── lookup/
│   ├── filter/
│   └── .../
├── README.md
├── roles/
│   ├── role1/
│   ├── role2/
│   └── .../
├── playbooks/
│   ├── files/
│   ├── vars/
│   ├── templates/
│   ├── playbook1.yml
│   └── tasks/
└── tests/
    ├── integration/
    └── unit/

In Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, automation hub serves as the source for Ansible Certified Content Collections.

Automation execution environments are consistent and shareable container images that serve as Ansible control nodes. Automation execution environments reduce the challenge of sharing Ansible content that has external dependencies.

Automation execution environments contain:

You can define and create an automation execution environment using Ansible Builder.

Ansible Builder is a command line tool that automates the process of building automation execution environments by using the metadata defined in various Ansible Collections or by the user.

Before Ansible Builder was developed, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform users could run into dependency issues and errors when creating custom virtual environments or containers that included all of the required dependencies installed.

Now, with Ansible Builder, you can easily create a customizable automation execution environments definition file that specifies the content you want to be included in your automation execution environments such as collections, third-party Python requirements, and system-level packages. This allows you to fulfill all of the necessary requirements and dependencies to get jobs running.

Automation content navigator is a command line, content-creator-focused tool with a text-based user interface. You can use Automation content navigator to:

Automation hub provides a place for Red Hat subscribers to quickly find and use content that is supported by Red Hat and our technology partners to deliver additional reassurance for the most demanding environments.

At a high level, automation hub provides an overview of all partners participating and providing certified, supported content.

From a central view, users can dive deeper into each partner and check out the collections.

Additionally, a searchable overview of all available collections is available.

Using Ansible on the command line is a useful way to run tasks that you do not repeat very often. The recommended way to handle repeated tasks is to write a playbook.

An ad hoc command for Ansible on the command line follows this structure:

ansible [pattern] -m [module] -a "[module options]"

$ ansible [pattern] -m [module] -a "[module options]"

You can install Ansible Builder using Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) to attach your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription. Attaching your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription allows you to access subscription-only resources necessary to install ansible-builder. Once you attach your subscription, the necessary repository for ansible-builder is automatically enabled.

You can install Automation content navigator on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from an RPM.

The following example demonstrates a successful installation:

View larger image

Base images that ship with Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 are hosted on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog (registry.redhat.io).

Playbooks contain one or more plays. A basic play contains the following sections:

- name: Set Up a Project and Job Template
  hosts: host.name.ip
  become: true

  tasks:
    - name: Create a Project
      ansible.controller.project:
        name: Job Template Test Project
        state: present
        scm_type: git
        scm_url: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-tower-samples.git

    - name: Create a Job Template
      ansible.controller.job_template:
        name: my-job-1
        project: Job Template Test Project
        inventory: Demo Inventory
        playbook: hello_world.yml
        job_type: run
        state: present

- name: Set Up a Project and Job Template
  hosts: host.name.ip
  become: true

  tasks:
    - name: Create a Project
      ansible.controller.project:
        name: Job Template Test Project
        state: present
        scm_type: git
        scm_url: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-tower-samples.git

    - name: Create a Job Template
      ansible.controller.job_template:
        name: my-job-1
        project: Job Template Test Project
        inventory: Demo Inventory
        playbook: hello_world.yml
        job_type: run
        state: present

You can create your own Collections locally with the Ansible Galaxy CLI tool. All of the Collection-specific commands can be activated by using the collection subcommand.

The above command will create a directory named from the namespace argument above (if one does not already exist) and then create a directory under that with the Collection name. Inside of that directory will be the default or "skeleton" Collection. This is where you can add your roles or plugins and start working on developing your own Collection.

In relation to execution environments, Collection developers can declare requirements for their content by providing the appropriate metadata in Ansible Builder.

Requirements from a Collection can be recognized in these ways:

Collection maintainers can verify that ansible-builder recognizes the requirements they expect by using the introspect command:

ansible-builder introspect --sanitize ~/.ansible/collections/

$ ansible-builder introspect --sanitize ~/.ansible/collections/

You can create roles by using the Ansible Galaxy CLI tool. Role-specific commands can be accessed from the roles subcommand.

ansible-galaxy role init <role_name>

ansible-galaxy role init <role_name>

Standalone roles outside of Collections are still supported, but new roles should be created inside of a Collection to take advantage of all the features Ansible Automation Platform has to offer.

This will create a role named my_role by copying the contents of ~/role_skeleton into my_role. The contents of role_skeleton can be any files or folders that are valid inside a role directory.

The concept of specifying a set of Collections for an environment is to resolve and install their dependencies. The Collections themselves are not required to be installed on the machine that you are generating the automation execution environments on.

An automation execution environments is built from this definition, and results in a container image. Please read the Ansible Builder documentation to learn the steps involved in creating these images.

Use the following sections to assist with additional steps in the migration process once you have upgraded to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 and automation controller 4.0.

Discovered virtual environments:

# Discovered virtual environments:
/var/lib/awx/venv/testing
/var/lib/venv/new_env

To export the contents of a virtual environment, re-run while supplying the path as an argument:
awx-manage export_custom_venv /path/to/venv

inventory_sources:
- id: 15
  name: celery
job_templates:
- id: 9
  name: Demo Job Template @ 2:40:47 PM
- id: 13
  name: elephant
organizations
- id: 3
  name: alternating_bongo_meow
- id: 1
  name: Default
projects: []

inventory_sources:
- id: 15
  name: celery
job_templates:
- id: 9
  name: Demo Job Template @ 2:40:47 PM
- id: 13
  name: elephant
organizations
- id: 3
  name: alternating_bongo_meow
- id: 1
  name: Default
projects: []

numpy==1.20.2
pandas==1.2.4
python-dateutil==2.8.1
pytz==2021.1
six==1.16.0

To list all available custom virtual environments run:
awx-manage list_custom_venvs

numpy==1.20.2
pandas==1.2.4
python-dateutil==2.8.1
pytz==2021.1
six==1.16.0

To list all available custom virtual environments run:
awx-manage list_custom_venvs

Migrating between versions of Ansible Core requires you to update your playbooks, plugins and other parts of your Ansible infrastructure to ensure they work with the latest version. This process requires that changes are validated against the updates made to each successive version of Ansible Core. If you intend to migrate from Ansible 2.9 to Ansible 2.11, you first need to verify that you meet the requirements of Ansible 2.10, and from there make updates to 2.11.

As a content creator, you can run your Ansible Playbooks with Automation content navigator and interactively delve into the results of each play and task to verify or troubleshoot the playbook. You can also run your Ansible Playbooks inside an execution environment and without an execution environment to compare and troubleshoot any problems.