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In this lesson, you will get some more practice creating Ansible Role's by creating a role to set up a basic web server. This role, named webserver, will be responsible for installing the Nginx package and deploying a simple HTML file to the server's web directory.
We're going to move a little faster in this lesson because you should already have created a basic role before. Repetition is how you learn, and that's the goal of this lesson (as well as making a cool web server).
Creating the Role Directory Structure
Assuming you have already created a roles directory from previous lessons, let's create a new role named webserver. Open your terminal and run the following command to set up our directories:
mkdir -p ~/roles/webserver/{tasks,handlers,templates,files,vars,defaults,meta}Defining Tasks for the Web Server Role
Next, we're going to use the apt module to install a package called nginx, which is a lightweight and easy-to-use web server.
Review help docs before getting started
From here, you know the drill, use ansible-doc to review the documenation for:
- The
aptmodule: See how install packages by specifying the name (nginx) and setting the state (present). - The
copymodule: See how to copy a file from our role directory to our target server. We want to set (src) and (dest).
After you've done that, let's define the tasks for the webserver role. Create a main.yml file in the tasks directory:
nano roles/webserver/tasks/main.ymlAdd the following tasks to the main.yml file:
---
# tasks file for webserver
- name: Install Nginx
apt:
name: nginx
state: present
become: yesThis will install the nginx package on our server. The next task in the playbook should be to copy our index.html file, which doesn't exist yet, but we will create it after we update this playbook. Add the following to the playbook after the task above:
- name: Copy index.html to web directory
copy:
src: index.html
dest: /var/www/html/index.html
become: yesCreate the HTML File
Now we want to create a simple HTML file to be deployed by the role. Let's create an HTML web page in the files directory called index.html:
nano ~/roles/webserver/files/index.htmlAdd some basic HTML content to this file:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to Our Web Server</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<p>This is a basic web page served by Nginx that was placed by Ansible.</p>
</body>
</html>Add The Role to a New Play
Let's update our existing playbook by adding a new play that targets our inventory group webservers. Open the playbook in your preferred editor:
nano ~/first_playbook.ymlAdd a new play to our first_playbook.yml file. Configure the hosts to include the inventory group webservers, and set the roles to include the webserver role
---
- hosts: all
become: yes
roles:
- common
- hosts: webservers
become: yes
roles:
- webserverThis playbook will apply the webserver role to all specified hosts.
Running the Playbook
Run the playbook to set up the web server across your managed nodes:
ansible-playbook first_playbook.ymlExecuting this command will install Nginx and deploy your basic HTML file to the web directory of the target machines.
Things are starting to get cool now! If I open my web browser and navigate to the IP address of my managed-node-1 server, I see this:
Very cool stuff! You could actually lose all the data on our servers so far, and after re-installing the OS, we would just need to setup our SSH keys, configure the static IP and we could get our server fully configured as it is now with a single run of ansible-playbook!
Conclusion
You've now created a functional Ansible role for setting up a basic Nginx web server and deploying a simple HTML file. This role demonstrates the power of Ansible in automating web server setup and configuration. As you progress, you can enhance this role with more complex configurations, such as setting up virtual hosts, SSL, or even deploying dynamic content.
Great job on completing this lesson! You're on your way to mastering the automation of server deployments using Ansible. See you in the next lesson!
