Ansible PlayBook to Launch Web-Server on Docker Container

4 min readJan 13, 2021

Ansible

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to do its tasks.

Ansible PlayBook

Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce or a set of steps in a general IT process. If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop, playbooks are your instruction manuals, and your inventory of hosts is your raw material. At a basic level, playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines. At a more advanced level, they can sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates and can delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way. While there’s a lot of information here, there’s no need to learn everything at once. You can start small and pick up more features over time as you need them. Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language. There are multiple ways to organize playbooks and the files they include, and we’ll offer up some suggestions on that and making the most out of Ansible.

Ansible Docs - https://docs.ansible.com/

Docker

Docker is a set of the platform as service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries, and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels. Developing apps today requires so much more than writing code. Multiple languages, frameworks, architectures, and discontinuous interfaces between tools for each lifecycle stage create enormous complexity. Docker simplifies and accelerates your workflow while giving developers the freedom to innovate with their choice of tools, application stacks, and deployment environments for each project.

Docker Docs - https://docs.docker.com/

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially called Apache, is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.

Apache HTTP Docs - https://httpd.apache.org/docs/

Task

Write an Ansible PlayBook that does the
following operations in the managed nodes:
🔹 Configure Docker
🔹 Start and enable Docker services
🔹 Pull the httpd server image from the Docker Hub
🔹 Run the docker container and expose it to the public
🔹 Copy the html code in /var/www/html directory
and start the webserver

Install ansible in Controller node and check it using “ansible — version” command.

Open an editor to start writing the playbook using the “vim <filename>.yml” command.

Note: Click here for the Github link of code.

- hosts: dockerhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:- name: Creating Yum Repository for Docker
    yum_repository:
     name: docker
     description: Docker Repo
     file: /etc/yum.repos.d/docker
     baseurl: https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/7/x86_64/stable
     gpgcheck: no
     enabled: true- name: Docker Package Installation
    command: "yum install docker-ce --nobest -y"- name: Install Software Python36
    package:
     name: python3
     state: present- name: Install Docker Python Library
    pip:
     name: docker-py- name: Creating WorkSpace
    file:
     path: /root/WS
     state: directory- name: Copying Content Into Managed Node
    copy:
     content: "Hello World!! Task 10 By Karan Agrawal"
     dest: "/root/WS/index.html"
    ignore_errors: yes- name: Starting Docker Service
    service:
     name: docker
     state: started- name: Pull an Image
    docker_image:
     name: httpd
     source: pull- name: Creating Docker Container
    docker_container:
     name: webseveros1
     image: httpd
     state: started
     detach: true
     interactive: true
     ports:
     - "1234:80"
     volumes:
     - /root/WS:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/