pombredanne / ansible-pex

Run ansible inside a pex that includes all playbooks, the inventory file and even custom modules.

ansible-pex

Run ansible inside a pex that includes all playbooks, the inventory file and even custom modules.

but.. why.. ??

Several reasons, but primarily, in a "cloudy" world, we should not be dependent on a master that "is out of date" with the inventory (hosts, etc.) as they come and go. One way to do that is to run playbooks locally against a host, which may be done by using AWS/GCE tags, user-data, etc. - I will leave the details to others to figure out.

Some benefits

• INSTALL + DEPENDENCIES : no need to install Ansible (and any / all of its dependencies) on a host anymore
• DISTRIBUTION : no need to git pull / clone a repository that has your inventory file, roles, playbooks and custom modules, you provide everything with the .pex file, which is versioned (or can be), which you could progress through environments (dev => qa => prod)
• SPEED : can be run as part of a cloud bootstrap to apply the play to the host, as it's run locally, it'll be very very fast

pre-requisites

• vagrant or docker (a host that's linux w/ python-dev(el) and general build-utils installed)
• python 2.6.9 (recommended: python 2.7.x)

ansible 2

currently does not work as is with anisble 2.x

python 3

not tested on / with python 3 but I cannot see anything that should prevent this from working

create the pex

set up the environment

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant

and create the pex

pex --disable-cache --python-shebang='/usr/bin/env python' plays -e plays -o distribution/builds/plays.pex

make it work for python 2.6.9

pex --disable-cache --python-shebang='/usr/bin/env python' plays -e plays.__main__ -o distribution/builds/plays.pex

run a playbook

copy plays.pex to a host you'd like to config manage, and run

./plays.pex -p test.yml

The playbook must be inside the plays/plays/ directory; or the playbooks must reside in the same directory as the does run.py.

options

currently the following options have been implemented

option	description
-h	help
--debug	should return debug output
--noop	do not actually execute
--diff	show diff, best to run with --noop
--playbook, -p	the playbook file name

credits

Most of the bits of running a playbook programatically are from http://oriolrius.cat/blog/2015/01/21/using-ansible-like-library-programming-in-python/