Ansible playbooks are amazing, as you learned yesterday. What if you deploy a simple web app using ansible, sounds like a good project, right?

Task-01

Create 3 EC2 instances . Make sure all three are created with same key pair

Launch 3 EC2 Instances with the same Private key pair, one will be the Ansible master and the remaining two will be nodes ( Ansible_Node1 and Ansible_Node2).

Install Ansible in host server

Connect to Your EC2 Instance using SSH

Add the Ansible PPA (Personal Package Archive) to your instance

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

Update System Packages

Install Ansible

Verify Ansible Installation

Copy the private key from local to Host server (Ansible_host) at (/home/ubuntu/.ssh)

Now, copy the private key pair from the local to the host server (Ansible master) at /home/ubuntu/.ssh and paste the private key in the file

Copy the private key from your local.

Give permissions to the private key file using chmod command.

Access the inventory file using sudo vim /etc/ansible/hosts

Create inventory file at location /etc/ansible/hosts which is by default location of the file. An Ansible hosts file is a configuration file that contains a list of hosts or servers. Add the IP addresses of the servers and also add private key file locations to use for authentication.

Use ansible-inventory --list -y to check the list of hosts

Create a playbook to install Nginx

Run the playbook using ansible-playbook command.

ansible-playbook file-name.yml

Deploy a sample webpage using the ansible playbook

Create a new file index.html in the playbook directory, and add some content

Update the Ansible playbook file install_nginx.yml in the playbook directory by providing the index.html file path, and the destination will be the default Nginx web server document root directory at /var/www/html/.

---
- name: playbook to install Nginx and deploy sample webpage
  hosts: all
  become: yes

  tasks:
    - name: Update apt package cache
      apt:
        update_cache: yes

    - name: Install Nginx
      apt:
        name: nginx
        state: latest

    - name: Start Nginx 
      service:
        name: nginx
        state: started

    - name: Deploy a sample webpage
      copy:
        src: /home/ubuntu/index.html
        dest: /var/www/html/
      become: true
      become_user: root
      become_method: sudo

This playbook will copy the index.html file to the default Nginx web server document root directory at /var/www/html/.

After successfully running the Ansible playbook, launch a web browser and navigate to the public IP address of any of the EC2 instances where Nginx is running.

Server1

Server2

Ansible Project

Task-01