Running Ansible provisioning on local host to configure remote host over SSH

18/03/2018 - ANSIBLE

In this example we are going to run Ansible provisioning on our local server to install "tree" package on remote server over SSH.


Prerequisites


I assume that you already have SSH keys set up on your local OS. In order to connect to remote host over SSH, we need to add our local server's public key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to remote server's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.


Control


Local


Check to see if we have SSH public key on our local server. We are interested in id_rsa.pub file.


local-user:local-server$ ls -l ~/.ssh/
-rw-------  1 inanzzz  staff  3243 20 Mar  2017 id_rsa
-rw-r--r--  1 inanzzz  staff   748 20 Mar  2017 id_rsa.pub
-rw-------  1 inanzzz  staff  5176 17 Mar 13:40 known_hosts

Remote


Check to see if remote server has authorized_keys file.


remote-user:remote-server$ ls -l ~/.ssh/
-rw-------  1 inanzzz  staff  5176 17 Mar 13:40 authorized_keys

Setup


Obtain the content of public key id_rsa.pub from local server and add it into authorized_keys file on the remote server.


local-user:local-server$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1y++SDsT1xc9+L2Q # This is actually longer

remote-user:remote-server$ echo "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1y++SDsT1xc9+L2Q" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Test SSH connection


We are going to connect to remote server from local server by using remote user's name and remote server's IP address.


local-user:local-server$ ssh remote-user@192.168.99.31

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-92-generic x86_64)

remote-user@linux:~$

Provisioning


hosts.yml


all:
  hosts:
    remote:
      ansible_connection: ssh
      ansible_user: remote-user
      ansible_host: 192.168.99.31
      ansible_port: 22

site.yml


---
# This playbook sets up whole stack.

- name: Configurations to "remote" host
  hosts: remote
  remote_user: remote-user
  become: yes
  tasks:
    - name: Install tree
      apt:
        name: tree
        state: present
        update_cache: yes
      tags:
        - tree

Build


local-user:local-server$ ansible-playbook site.yml -i hosts.yml -vvvv

PLAYBOOK: site.yml ************************************************************
1 plays in site.yml

PLAY [Configurations to "remote" host] ****************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ********************************************************

ok: [remote]
META: ran handlers

TASK [Install tree] ***********************************************************

META: ran handlers
META: ran handlers

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
remote                     : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0

Test


remote-user:remote-server$ tree --version
tree v1.7.0