Workshop-Environment

The Ansible playbooks in this repository will create a demo environment comparable to the Ansible Workshop in the Red Hat Demo environment, but instead of virtual machines, it will create Podman containers acting as the managed nodes.
The demo environment will mimic the RH Demo Environment with three managed nodes: node1, node2 and node3. The Ansible control node will be known as ansible-1 in the lab inventory.
Although containers are used, all managed nodes are accessible via SSH, a couple of ports are exposed with every container:

Managed node	Port 80	Port 8080
node1	8002	8003
node2	8005	8006
node3	8008	8009

For example, if you want to access a webserver running on port 8080 on node2, you'll need to access it via http://localhost:8006.

NOTE: If any ports in the range of 8001 to 8009 are already occupied, deployment will fail! You can adjust the ports to be used in the inventory.ini.

If you want to resolve the hosts (containers) with their hostname, adjust your /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost node1 node2 node3

You still need to add the port, but now you can run curl http://node1:8002.

The SSH port for every container is also exposed via a high port (node1 on 8001, node2 on 8004 and node3 on 8007), but you can access the managed nodes container like this:

ssh node1

NOTE: First login might take a while, subsequent logins will be faster!

This is achieved by the addition of a block to your personal ~/.ssh/config. A SSH keypair is created for the Workshop (stored as ~/.ssh/ansible-workshop-environment and ~/.ssh/ansible-workshop-environment.pub).

As with the RH Demo environment, you will find your Ansible Workshop inventory file at ~/lab_inventory/hosts. An Ansible configuration file is created at ~/.ansible.cfg.

NOTE: If you already have a config file at this location, a backup is created.

Prepare (local) Ansible control node

You need Python 3.10+, install it (or a newer version). In most Linux distributions, Python is already present. Install the Python package manager, e.g.:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Install ansible-core.

Currently (Q3 2024), using the latest Ansible version (2.17+) is not recommended, if you want to automate older (distributions with Python3.6 or less), as we do in the Workshop.

pip3 install ansible-core==2.16.8 --user

Ansible is installed to ~/.local/bin, if this path is not yet added to the PATH environment variable (you can't use Ansible directly), run source ~/.profile.

Create Workshop environment

Clone this repository and change into the directory:

git clone https://github.com/TimGrt/Workshop-Environment.git && cd Workshop-Environment

Install the necessary requirements for Ansible with the following command:

ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml

To create the managed node containers, run the create-workshop-environment playbook:

ansible-playbook create-workshop-environment.yml

The playbook checks if the Podman container runtime is installed. If it is not present, the playbook will try to install it, this task is the only one where sudo permissions are necessary. Either run the playbook with --ask-become-pass (if you need to provide a sudo password by default) or install Podman manually. For Ubuntu or Debian, use the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install podman  

Take a look at the Podman documentation for additional information and installation instructions for different distributions.

The playbook will do the following steps:

1. Install Podman (if necessary).
2. Pull a Docker image and start as many containers as are defined in the inventory.
3. Deploy the Workshop inventory (not the same as is used by this playbook!) to ~/lab_inventory/hosts.
4. Add a block with SSH config to access the managed nodes to ~/.ssh/config.
5. Deploy the Ansible configuration for the Workshop to ~/.ansible.cfg.
6. Create a SSH keypair for the Workshop (~/.ssh/ansible-workshop-environment and ~/.ssh/ansible-workshop-environment.pub).
7. Prepare all managed nodes.

Delete Workshop environment

After completing the workshop, you can remove all traces of the demo environment by running the delete-workshop-environment playbook:

ansible-playbook create-workshop-environment.yml

The playbook will do the following steps:

1. Delete the managed node containers.
2. Delete the folder with the workshop inventory (~/lab_inventory/hosts).
3. Remove the managed nodes from ~/.ssh/known_hosts if they were accessed manually.
4. Delete the block from ~/.ssh/config which was added for the workshop.
5. Delete the Ansible configuration from ~/.ansible.cfg, if a backup was created, a hint is shown.
6. Delete the keypair created for the workshop (~/.ssh/ansible-workshop-environment and ~/.ssh/ansible-workshop-environment.pub).

If you want to delete the Podman installation as well, run the playbook like this:

ansible-playbook delete-workshop-environment.yml -e delete_podman=true