rmasters/ansible-vm

A VM builder for running Ansible on Windows

Ansible VM

Quickly sets up a Virtual Machine with Ansible installed for use on platforms where Ansible isn't available (like Windows for the moment).

The VM configures itself using Ansible as inspired by Christian's Quora post.

Usage

Generally, I add the path to the Ansible playbooks as a synced folder in Vagrantfile, ssh into the VM and run ansible-playbooks from that session.

There is a trick to be aware of with the synced folders however. Ansible allows inventories (host listings) to be executable files (if you want to use some sort of host inventory system or API response). If the inventory file given is executable Ansible will try and run it - which doesn't work if you are using static host files. By default, VirtualBox mounts shares with all files as executable so we need to disable this with a mount flag:

config.vm.synced_folder "../other-project/playbooks", "/project", mount_options: ["fmode=660"]

Use fmode=666 if you're logging in as a user that is not in the vboxsf group for some reason (vagrant is in the group in most boxes).

ansible-vm's Issues

PPA appears to be installing an old version of Ansible

vagrant@precise32:/prj/ops$ ansible-playbook -i production webservers.yml
ERROR: roles is not a legal parameter in an Ansible Playbook
vagrant@precise32:/prj/ops$ ansible --version
ansible 1.1

Should be 1.3.x, which gets installed when the VM's been dist-upgraded.

Given that this is a 142MB download, I'd recommend keeping this VM around for a while...

Sometimes, vagrant up doesn't always run the shell provisioner

Not sure why, might be affected by moving the shell line around in the Vagrantfile. Running vagrant provision afterwards runs without error.