Installation of Rundeck with the Ansible plugin on Centos 7
This post shows you how to install Rundeck with the Ansible plugin on Centos 7. The installation is done with nginx as the web server and using SSL with a self signed certificate. Please read the Ansible installation script, and modify anything that should be different for your situation. You will be amazed how well readable the installation script is!
Rundeck is a web based user interface that allows you to run commands against a group of hosts. Rundeck has an ansible plugin. Using that plugin, it could perform the similar functionality as Ansible Tower (commercial product) or Semaphore (open source).
After a fresh installation of Centos 7, do the following as root:
yum -y localinstall https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm yum -y install ansible git git clone https://gitlab.com/FritsHoogland/install_rundeck.git
This adds the EPEL (extra packages for Enterprise Linux) repository to Centos, which contains ansible and git. The next yum command installs ansible (the orchestration software) and git (distributed version control). The git clone command pulls the ansible orchestration script from my install_rundeck git repository at gitlab.
It is important to open the install_rundeck/install_rundeck.yml script and modify anything that is different in your situation. The public hostname will most likely be different than the 192.168.66.16 in the script. You might want to change the locality information with the certificate generation (unless you live in Lutjebroek like me :-). If you do a corporate installation, you might want to skip this step altogether and get a certificate pair signed by your company’s CA.
Please mind I ran into issues with ansible inventories:
– The hosts in the inventory need to have ansible run against them to pick up their properties and become visible in rundeck in the nodes tab. For being able to have ansible run against the hosts in the inventory, the host need to exist in the ssh known hosts file of the rundeck user, otherwise ansible can’t run and the host or hosts will not be visible in rundeck. The solution is to log in as the rundeck user and logon to the hosts in the inventory once manually and accept the host or hosts. From a security perspective it’s understandable that you careful need to assess the hosts to trust, but from an automation standpoint this is annoying. Outside of essentially filling out the known hosts file as I described, there are several other workarounds.
– I created an ansible inventory file in the rundeck project directory and entered the hosts in it. Rundeck picked up the hosts (after solving the above point they became visible in the nodes tab), however when executing something using ansible via rundeck it would say ‘[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available’. This means ansible was not pointed explicitly to an inventory, so it used the default one. In order to solve this, I symlinked my (rundeck) project inventory to the /etc/ansible/hosts to make it centrally available. Apparently, using a central inventory for ansible using the plugin is by design. I would rather have rundeck generate an inventory per execution, and pointing to it when the plugin executes ansible.
Now install rundeck:
ansible-playbook install_rundeck/install_rundeck.yml
Done!
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