ansible-multienv-base

Template for ansible project that allows to easily manage multiple environments (e.g. staging, test, production) and harden new hosts

Description

This is my base template for ansible projects requiring multiple environment deployment. General idea is to use multiple inventories, and be able to easily add new hosts / groups / environments, each with own variables.

Structure

|- hosts
|  |- shared-secrets.yml  # encrypted vars, used in all environments
|  |- shared-vars.yml     # not encrypted vars, used in all environments
|  |- environment1        # directory for environment (e.g. test or staging)
|  |  |- inventory        # inventory file with definitions of all required hosts
|  |  |- secrets.yml      # encrpted vars for this environment
|  |  |- groups_vars
|  |     |- all.yml       # normal group_vars, like in typical ansible project
|  |- environment2        # directory for other environment
|     |- inventory
|     |- secrets.yml
|     |- groups_vars
|        |- all.yml
|- roles                  # all ansible roles used in playbooks
|  |- role1
|     |- ...
|- playbook1.yml          # here we put our playbooks

Usage

git clone https://github.com/Valian/ansible-multienv-base

Next, we must create our playbooks, fill inventories and variables, create roles etc. To encrypt secret variables file, use

ansible-vault encrypt path-to-file     # Caution! Pass must be the same in every encrypted file

There is also a special task, that we should include in pre_tasks in each playbook, called tasks/load_vars.yml. To run playbook against specified environemnt, we must use

ansible-playbook -i hosts/desired_env/inventory --ask-vault-pass playbook.yml

Hope this will be helpful to somebody.

You can find me on Twitter @jskalc