@#$%@ Ansible

While the title may indicate that this is a core dump post, I won’t quite say that it clears that hurdle… quite… But it is definitely a frustration which has raised its head a few times, and over the past 24 hours, went from a minor nuisance to a major frustration.

The problem, and the solution in theory

For those of you not familiar with Ansible, it is used for performing tasks controlled from a central host, and doing so using things called “roles” and “playbooks” (which you write once and reuse, like any good developer, DevOps member, etc.). And for your inventory, you can have variables associated with a given host, or for the groups to which it belongs. But, by default, Ansible overwrites the variables of the same name, based on a prioritized hierarchy. For example, let us suppose we have a variable listing users we want to add to a machine if they are not already there, which we will call provisioned_users. And depending on which group of machines, such as development servers, testing servers, or web servers (with say names of dev_servers, test_servers, and web_servers), there are a set of users which we want to be on the machine. But what if we have a machine which belongs to multiple groups, or there is a really special user, such as an application developer who helps the normal testers and DevOps folks at all stages in the life cycle. Normally, Ansible would then require you to go to all sorts of hassles for that. But I found a post by the folks at Leapfrog which talks about a plugin which solves this problem, and even shows some good examples to understand the problem better. And they even share their plugin for folks to use!

Now… for me, the problem came up with my letsencrypt-certs role, which I have been using to push my SSL certificates from a central administration host to the various web servers I have for both internal and external use (i.e. this one), along with the SSL certificates for my LDAP server, and more. This has meant that I have run into the collision on variables between groups and the host, and last night, I got a warning from my Nagios installation on a couple of those certificates needing “renewed”, which was mainly just my needing to push the certificates into place. And given that one of the certificates is a part of the collision… time to address the issue, and I might as well do it right. 🙂

The solution in reality

Well, in reality, I found a couple of gotchas… the first is that the instructions seems to imply that with a playbook in /etc/ansible/playbooks that the folder in installation step 4 would be /etc/ansible/action_plugins/… but this is not the case. Indeed, I got the following (with the verbosity cranked a bit):

# ansible-playbook -vvvvvvvvv update-certificates.yml
ansible-playbook 2.6.3
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = [u'/root/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/bin/ansible-playbook
  python version = 2.7.5 (default, Jul 13 2018, 13:06:57) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-28)]
Using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file
setting up inventory plugins
Parsed /etc/ansible/hosts inventory source with yaml plugin
ERROR! no action detected in task. This often indicates a misspelled module name, or incorrect module path.

The error appears to have been in '/home/cinnion/git/ansible-roles/letsencrypt-certs/tasks/main.yml': line 3, column 3, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

# tasks file for letsencrypt-certs
- name: Merge certificates
  ^ here

And just putting it in the modules directory does not help. There, it complains that it does not start with the interpreter line (e.g. #!/usr/bin/env python or some equivalent). Instead, for a playbook in that location which uses it, the location would be one of these locations:

  • /etc/ansible/playbooks/action_plugins
  • /usr/share/ansible/plugins/action (the default, which is mentioned in the ansible.cfg file, and can be overridden there.)

or, in a directory named action_plugins directly under the role itself (e.g. parallel to the handlers, tasks, and similar subdirectories. Since I will be using this for multiple playbooks/roles (Keep things DRY!!!), and really dislike putting things in a directory like the default ansible uses (if it included /usr/local, I would have less hesitation, though spreading customizations out is still sub-optimal in my book), I created /etc/ansible/plugins/action, placed the file in that directory, and changed the config file to include that location.

A second issue comes up in that is a minor pain is that instead of being able to have a role which conditionally executes from the playbook based off the variable being defined, the task file in the role needs to do this condition handling. It is not a huge deal… it just means refactoring the file. But that is probably a good move in the long run anyways.

A third issue, which may just be caused by my using fact caching, is that even without specifying that the variables which are the result of the merge are to be cached, I am getting warnings about overwriting the fact. That will take some looking into at some point.

Now, to see how things work in real usage for a week or two.

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