Ansible 101 - Episode 10 - Ansible Tower and AWX

Jeff Geerling (geerlingguy) demonstrates Ansible Tower and AWX, and compares the two tools, following examples in chapter 11 of Ansible for DevOps.

Contents:

00:00 - Start
00:35 - Spaaaaaace!
03:29 - Intro
04:51 - Questions from last episode
11:13 - Intro to Tower and AWX
15:00 - How to install Tower or AWX
21:28 - Running the Demo Job Template
22:19 - Adding a playbook to Tower
27:50 - Using Galaxy roles and collections
29:58 - Add a credential to Tower
33:21 - Add an inventory to Tower
36:15 - Add a git project to Tower
38:23 - Add a job template to Tower
41:01 - Using Galaxy requirements in Tower
44:20 - Failure to launch
50:52 - Tower Dashboard and other parts
54:51 - Jenkins section in book
56:28 - Outtro
58:54 - Someone fell upstairs

[noskillaah]

Funny detail in 2022, from the AWX installation docs: "Starting in version 18.0, the AWX Operator is the preferred way to install AWX."
Well done Jeff, thanks again!

[swaru]

Waiting for this for long time !!! Thank you Jeff!!

[edquillen]

I don't think you selected your new machine credential for your job template which may be the cause of the error.

[ajpieri]

I do not understand what I am doing wrong, but when I execute my template it does not seem to try to pull the collections. I tried putting my requirements.yml file in a "collections" directory at the same level as my main.yml (top directory level). I have also put the requirements.yml next to the main.yml as well. Neither worked. I am using Ansible Tower 3.7.4 with Ansible 2.9.15. Do I need to include an actual anisble-galaxy command in my ansible script itself? Or should it find the collections by just having the the collections/requirements.yml?

[selormey]

How do I run a job template against a specific group in my inventory?

[EViL]

I think you're timelines on this are screwed - you have a whole section at 22:22 title "Adding playbook to Tower", and its just waffle about a github repo... I don't see much regarding tower, until after 30:00 :S .. But this has been very useful to give some grounding on usage, so thank you very mich :D

[healthvative]

I am new to ansible. I want to use ansible /ansible awx to handle large Linux update automatically but I am not a fan of using agent. Can this task be done with a ansible?

[MalfuncEddie]

I love AWX/tower and it API. But some things are just not possible.
Eg:
I have not found a way to query an inventory via the api and apply a limit to it. a simple question like:

On what hosts of inventory X with group limit Y will this template run?

Is not possible I think.
CLI it would just be ansible-playbook --list-hosts -i X -l Y

[MuhammadZahid-mkys]

Hi Jeff, i have issue while executing playbook in ansible tower. It fails on the task which contains delegate to: localhost. Any idea is it a bug or not supported?

[AlejandroRodriguez-wtmk]

Nice, i just will be working with tower. This is a nice intro.

[pedrosilva]

Hi, you have some usefull examples to integrate netbox inventory to AWX?

[pardesi_swiss]

Hello,
I want to find a way if we can re-run the workflow template where it failed last time?
In Ansible tower.

Please if you can respond.

[tbard]

Apparently the installation method for AWX (compared to the one in the book) changed and that doesn't work anymore :( Do you have a video or something on how to configure a proper K8s cluster with AWX on it, instead of the test one?

[victornoagbodji]

🙏 🙏 😊
thanks for this wonderful overview !!

[Joey-vwei]

I have a Problem to run my Playbook, i will save the Config from a Cisco Switch. And i get this. [WARNING]: Could not match supplied host pattern, ignoring: SWITCHES
PLAY [SWITCHES]
skipping: no hosts matched And i don´t find the Problem. In Inventories i write the Name SWITCHES with GROUP hosts under host i call it 10.10.1.13 from my Switch (variables hosts: 10.10.1.13) and under the Hosts i Add the Host 10.10.1.13 with Inventory SWITCHES. Thx for Help.

[kzfittycent]

Semaphore is an option for a replacement to Tower. Didn't say it was better, just said it's an option.

[BrianMezini]

very cool content, also bought the book

[mohamedsamet]

Is there a good possible installation with helm charts?
I think It's much easier with helm

[watsonasus]

How to porting the Ansible Galaxy collections to Ansible Tower perfectly ? Great sharing and thanks a lot.
First, run
#ansible-galaxy collection install devsec.hardening on Ansible Tower server successfully
and then wrote an simple playbook (yml file) on Project of Ansible Tower platform.

Finally, it shows error message as below when I launch it on Ansible Tower latest version 3.8.

ERROR! the role was not found in

The offending line appears to be:

19
20 roles:
21 - devsec.hardening.os_hardening
22 ^ here

[johngomez]

Is this a nasa video ? The intro and the ads it’s about 4 mins lol