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Ansible Provisioner

Provisioner name: "ansible"

The ansible provisioner allows you to provision the guest using Ansible playbooks.

Ansible playbooks are YAML documents that comprise the set of steps to be orchestrated on one or more machines. This documentation page will not go into how to use Ansible or how to write Ansible playbooks, since Ansible is a complete deployment and configuration management system that is beyond the scope of a single page of documentation.

Warning: If you're not familiar with Ansible and Vagrant already, I recommend starting with the shell provisioner. However, if you're comfortable with Vagrant already, Vagrant is a great way to learn Ansible.

Inventory File

When using Ansible, it needs to know on which machines a given playbook should run. It does this by way of an inventory file which lists those machines. In the context of Vagrant, there are two ways to approach working with inventory files. The first and simplest option is to not provide one to Vagrant at all. Vagrant will generate inventory files for each virtual machine it manages, and use them for provisioning machines. Generated inventory files are created adjacent to your Vagrantfile, named using the machine names set in your Vagrantfile.

The second option is for situations where you'd like to have more than one virtual machine in a single inventory file, perhaps leveraging more complex playbooks or inventory grouping. If you provide the ansible.inventory_path option referencing a specific inventory file dedicated to your Vagrant project, that one will be used instead of generating them. Such an inventory file for use with Vagrant might look like:

[vagrant]
192.168.111.222

Where the above IP address is one set in your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.111.222"

Playbook

The second component of a successful Ansible provisioner setup is the Ansible playbook which contains the steps that should be run on the guest. Ansible's playbook documentation goes into great detail on how to author playbooks, and there are a number of best practices that can be applied to use Ansible's powerful features effectively. A playbook that installs and starts (or restarts if it was updated) the NTP daemon via YUM looks like:

---
- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: ensure ntpd is at the latest version
      yum: pkg=ntp state=latest
      notify:
      - restart ntpd
  handlers:
    - name: restart ntpd
      service: name=ntpd state=restarted

You can of course target other operating systems that don't have YUM by changing the playbook tasks. Ansible ships with a number of modules that make running otherwise tedious tasks dead simple.

Running Ansible

To run Ansible against your Vagrant guest, the basic Vagrantfile configuration looks like:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
    ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
  end
end

This causes Vagrant to run the playbook.yml playbook against all hosts in the inventory file. Since an Ansible playbook can include many files, you may also collect the related files in a directory structure like this:

$ tree
.
|-- Vagrantfile
|-- provisioning
|   |-- group_vars
|           |-- all
|   |-- playbook.yml

In such an arrangement, the ansible.playbook path should be adjusted accordingly:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
    ansible.playbook = "provisioning/playbook.yml"
  end
end

Additional Options

The Ansible provisioner also includes a number of additional options that can be set, all of which get passed to the ansible-playbook command that ships with Ansible.

ansible.extra_vars can be used to pass a hash of additional variables to the playbook. For example:

ansible.extra_vars = {
  ntp_server: "pool.ntp.org",
  nginx_workers: 4
}

These variables take the highest precedence over any other variables.

ansible.sudo can be set to true to cause Ansible to perform commands using sudo.
ansible.sudo_user can be set to a string containing a username on the guest who should be used by the sudo command.
ansible.ask_sudo_pass can be set to true to require Ansible to prompt for a sudo password.
ansible.limit can be set to a string or an array of machines or groups from the inventory file to further narrow down which hosts are affected.
ansible.verbose can be set to increase Ansible's verbosity to obtain detailed logging:
- 'v', verbose mode
- 'vv'
- 'vvv', more
- 'vvvv', connection debugging
ansible.tags can be set to a string or an array of tags. Only plays, roles and tasks tagged with these values will be executed.
ansible.skip_tags can be set to a string or an array of tags. Only plays, roles and tasks that do not match these values will be executed.
ansible.start_at_task can be set to a string corresponding to the task name where the playbook provision will start.
ansible.raw_arguments is an unsafe wildcard string that can be used to take advantage of ansible-playbook arguments that are not (yet) supported by this Vagrant provisioner plugin. This can be very useful when integrating with bleeding edge Ansible versions. Following precedence rules apply:
- Any supported options (described above) will override conflicting raw_arguments value (e.g. --tags or --start-at-task)
- Vagrant default user authentication can be overridden via raw_arguments (with custom values for --user and --private-key)
ansible.host_key_checking can be set to false which will disable host key checking and prevent "FAILED: (25, 'Inappropriate ioctl for device')" errors from being reported during provisioner runs. The default value is true, which matches the default behavior of Ansible 1.2.1 and later.

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