Welcome to GeekOops! This post acts as a tutorial to start with the first role of this project: Installing and configuring a nginx webserver via the geekoops-nginx role.

Let’s assume we want to roll this role out on our imaginary jellyfish server. We need to have root ssh access to jellyfish. Ansible also supports sudo, but this is not covered here. So first make sure you can do the following

# Make sure you can login into our imaginary test server as root!
ssh root@jellyfish

All of the next steps will take place in a temporary directory. I in general keep all my ansible stuff in a dedicated ansible folder in my home directory, for this tutorial we are going to use a empty new folder, as you might want to dump everything afterwards.

# For this tutorial we start in a virgin new folder
mkdir jellyfish-sandbox
cd jellyfish-sandbox

Now, clone the geekoops-nginx role

git clone https://github.com/GeekOops/geekoops-nginx

Ansible operates with so-called Playbooks. Playbooks are a yaml file that tell ansible what to do. Roughly it consists of a definition of which hosts ansible should operate on and what to do there. For this example we are going to use the following playbook, which you store as jellyfish.yml:

---
# Example playbook for nginx on jellyfish
- hosts: jellyfish
  user: root
  
  roles:
     - role: geekoops-nginx
       vars:
         setup_default_page: true
         default_page_hostname: "{{ansible_host}}"
         config_firewall: true
         firewall_zone: "public"

Last thing is to create a custom inventory. Although you might have put jellyfish into your ~/.ssh/config already, ansible needs also to know that this is a host for it. For that we create a file called inventory with this simple line:

jellyfish

Ok, when you have done that, then we’re ready to rock. Run ansible-playbook with the inventory and the playbook:

ansible-playbook -i inventory jellyfish.yml

Ansible now runs the playbook, nginx will be installed and the firewall will open the http (80) and https (443) port for you on the “public” zone.

Done!