Using Ansible Tower

Introduction to Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower is a web-based solution that makes Ansible even more easy to use for IT teams of all kinds. It provides a graphical user interface, REST API, and other tools to manage Ansible tasks. Ansible Tower is designed to be the hub for all of your automation tasks.

Installation and Setup

To get started with Ansible Tower, you need to install it on your system. Follow these steps:

1. Download the Ansible Tower setup bundle from the official Ansible website.
2. Extract the setup bundle and navigate to the setup directory.
3. Run the setup script with the necessary configurations.

Once the script completes, you can access the Ansible Tower web interface via your browser.

Logging into Ansible Tower

Open your browser and navigate to the Ansible Tower URL (e.g., http:///). Enter your credentials to log in. If this is your first time logging in, you will be prompted to create an admin account.

Creating an Organization

Organizations in Ansible Tower allow you to group users and manage their permissions. To create an organization:

1. Navigate to the Organizations section in the Tower interface.
2. Click the +Add button to create a new organization.
3. Fill in the required details such as name and description, then click Save.

Adding an Inventory

Inventories are groups of hosts that Ansible Tower manages. To add an inventory:

1. Navigate to the Inventories section.
2. Click the +Add button and select Inventory.
3. Provide a name and optionally a description, then click Save.

Next, you need to add hosts to this inventory:

1. Select the inventory you created.
2. Go to the Hosts tab and click +Add.
3. Fill in the host details and click Save.

Creating and Managing Projects

Projects in Ansible Tower are a logical collection of Ansible playbooks, represented in Tower. To create a project:

1. Navigate to the Projects section.
2. Click the +Add button.
3. Provide a name, description, and SCM type, then specify the SCM URL (e.g., a Git repository).
4. Click Save to create the project.

Creating Job Templates

Job templates define the parameters for running Ansible playbooks. To create a job template:

1. Navigate to the Job Templates section.
2. Click the +Add button.
3. Provide a name and select the inventory, project, and playbook.
4. Configure additional parameters as needed, then click Save.

Running Jobs

To run a job template:

1. Navigate to the Job Templates section.
2. Select the job template you created.
3. Click the Launch button to start the job.

You can monitor the job status and view the output in real-time.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to use Ansible Tower from start to finish. You installed and set up Ansible Tower, created organizations, inventories, projects, and job templates, and ran jobs. Ansible Tower provides a powerful interface for managing your Ansible automation tasks, making it easier to scale and manage complex deployments.