mcritchlow/vagrant-as-infrastructure

Vagrant+Ansible to Replicate a Production Infrastructure Design

Vagrant as Infrastructure

Inspired by Maxim Chernyak's blog post 6 practices for super smooth Ansible experience

The goal is to produce the convenient local playground, but skipping the ssh key insertion (Vagrant does that for us) and editing /etc/hosts (not available on Windows) while still allowing full access to the guest VMs.

Makefile

Makefile is all you need. Everything else can be downloaded automatically, or use your own personal versions.

Minimal Invocation

Download the Makefile, then

• make Vagrantfile all

or

• vagrant init centos/7; make all

Requirements

• GNU Make
• Vagrant
• A provider (VirtualBox, VMware, etc)
• Ansible
• perl

Optional

• curl

Usage

• make all does the following:
  • make up Brings up all Vagrant boxes (same as vagrant up)
  • make roles Install Ansible Galaxy roles from "roles.yml" or "config/roles.yml"
  • make .ssh-config Create ssh configuration
  • make .inventory Create ansible inventory
  • make ansible.cfg Create default ansible.cfg
  • make main Run main.yml playbook, if present
  • make ip Display the IPs of all the VMs*

Other commands:

• make Vagrantfile Downloads sample Vagrantfile and GUESTS.rb
• make GUESTS.rb Downloads sample GUESTS.rb (used by sample Vagrantfile)
• make clean-roles Removes installed ansible roles*
• make clean Removes ansible files
• make copyright Displays copyright information
• make etc-hosts Add host records to all guests
• make license Displays license information
• make roles-force Update all roles, overwriting when required
• make ping Pings all guests via Ansible's ping module
• make python Installs python on Debian systems*
• make root-key Copies vagrant ssh key for root user access
• make update Downloads latest version from GitHub*
• make version Displays installed version

Method

• Uses a provided or downloaded Vagrantfile to create the application stack systems. See Vagrantfile.sample and GUESTS.rb.sample for a starting point.
• Install any required Galaxy roles (optional)
• Write the ssh configuration (as provided by Vagrant)
• Create ansible.cfg that uses the above ssh configuration

Your Ansible playbooks can now access the Vagrant VMs as if they were a part of your infrastructure, either by name or by group.

Overrides

The Makefile will accept command line options, or read from similarly named environmental variables:

• ETC_HOSTS etc-hosts playbook*
• INVENTORY ansible inventory file*
• MAIN default playbok to run, if present
• REPO upstream repository
• RETRYPATH directory to place .retry files
• ROLES_PATH ansible roles path
• SAMPLEVAGRANTFILE upstream Vagrantfile.sample
• SSHCONFIG location of generated ssh configuration*
• VAULTPASSWORDFILE path to ansible vault password file

Roles

If roles.yml or config/roles.yml exists, the listed roles will be downloaded from Galaxy. If both exist, then roles.yml will take precedence.

Hosts and Groups

The inventory will group related hosts into groups. Related hosts all share the same prefix. web-1, web-2, web-3 will all be a part of [web]. Only the last suffix is considered. web-east-1 would be in only [web-east].

etc-hosts

Update all guests' /etc/hosts with all other guests' internal networking IPs to allow name-based addressing without relying on external DNS.

Vagrantfile/GUESTS.rb

Available is Vagrantfile paired with GUESTS.rb. The Vagrantfile factors out various Vagrant features (such as port forwarding, cpu, memory allocation). GUESTS.rb lists all the vagrant boxes, so the Vagrantfile can be upgraded without having to redefine all the boxes.

Options are:

• name: [MANDATORY] (string) Name of box
• box: (string) guest OS (ubuntu/bionic64, centos/7, etc)
  • default DEFAULT_BOX
• ip: (string) Additional IP for guest-to-guest communication
  • Can be fully expressed dotted quad (10.1.2.3)
  • Can be final octet only (3)
  • Can be 'dhcp' to allow provider to allocate
  • default nil
• ports: (array) Ports to forward. Can be a hash, to further refine defintion
  • auto_correct: move host port in case of collision (default true)
  • guest_ip: (string) (default nil)
  • host_ip: (string) (default nil)
  • host: (string) Port on host (default same as guest)
  • id: (string) friendly name (default nil)
  • protocol: (string) tcp or udp (default nil)
  • default nil
• sync: (boolean) Sync local folder to guest (default false)
• cpus: (integer) Number of CPUs to assign (default per box)
• gui: (boolean) Allocate GUI (default false)
• memory: (integer) Memory in KB (default per box)
• needs_python: (boolean) Install python/python-apt in guest
  • default true for Debian/Ubuntu
  • default false for all others
• update: (boolean) Update guest OS packages (default false)
• file: (string|array of strings) File provisioner, copies file to guest
  • relative filename relative to $HOME
  • absolute filename absolute in guest
  • can be an array, for multiple files
  • default nil
• shell: (string|array of strings) script to run at provisioning
  • can be an array, for multiple shell provisioners
  • default nil
• ansible: (string|array of strings) playbook to run at provisioning
  • can be an array, for multiple playbook provisioners
  • default nil

See GUESTS.rb.sample for examples.

Python

A box with a name that includes "Debian" or "Ubuntu" (case insensitive) will have python and python-apt installed automatically. This can be overridden by setting needs_python: false in the GUESTS.rb defintion for the box.

If needs_python: true is set, apt-get needs to be present.

Caveats

The clean-roles target will clean all the roles, even ones manually installed.

The ip target may fail on non-Linux guests.

The update target will overwrite the Makefile.

The etc-hosts target works best when there is only one additional interface.

Certain variables, ETC_HOSTS, INVENTORY, and SSHCONFIG, will break if there is embedded whitespace.