Getting started with Ansible for configuration management (Tutorial)

In this Ansible tutorial for beginners, we’ll cover getting started with Ansible as a configuration management tool for setting up a bare CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu server with more secure SSH settings and a few tools to make your life a little easier.

Our goals:

1. Set up a non-root user
2. Give the new user sudo access
3. Disable password-based logins
4. Disable root logins
5. Use SSH keys for logins

Prerequisites for this Ansible configuration management tutorial

• A newly-provisioned or rebuilt server running any of our OS options—CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu.

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Step 1: Install Ansible on your local machine

To get started using Ansible for configuration management, you first need to install it on your local machine. Ansible's documenation gives installation instructions for a variety of platforms, including various *nix distributions and OS X.

Step 2: Edit the Ansible hosts file

To connect Ansible to your VPS, you need to specify its IP address within Ansible’s hosts file. On Linux and OS X machines, that can be found at /etc/ansible/hosts.

The beginning of the file should look like this:

# This is the default ansible 'hosts' file.
#
# It should live in /etc/ansible/hosts
#
#   - Comments begin with the '#' character
#   - Blank lines are ignored
#   - Groups of hosts are delimited by [header] elements
#   - You can enter hostnames or ip addresses
#   - A hostname/ip can be a member of multiple groups

# Ex 1: Ungrouped hosts, specify before any group headers.

## green.example.com
## blue.example.com
## 192.168.100.1
## 192.168.100.10

To enable your VPS, simply add the IP address anywhere in this file underneath an [ssdnodes] grouping.

There should be no other symbols—like the # comment—in the line.

[ssdnodes]
123.45.67.89

Now, test out your configuration by pinging your VPS. For now, you have to use -u root to ensure you’re trying to connect via the root account.

$ ansible all -m ping -u root

If it’s successful, you’ll see the following output:

123.45.67.89 | SUCCESS