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Version: 2024.1

Tips and Tricks for Ansible Playbooks

Please take the following under consideration when developing your playbook:

  • Make sure the Execution Server can access the script’s raw URL.

  • When setting the VM user’s credentials in the App, make sure you provide the credentials of a user that has the necessary permissions to successfully execute all the playbook’s tasks.

  • There's no need to include a hosts file in the playbook ZIP. At runtime, the Execution Server does the following:

    1. Creates a dedicated hosts file, listing any groups specified in the App's Inventory Groups field along with the App's IP.
    2. Packages the playbook ZIP with the new hosts file.
    3. Sends the playbook package to the Ansible Server.

  • If the App’s VM takes a long time to fully load, you may want to adjust the maximum time for the machine to respond, by setting the Timeout Minutes attribute on the Custom Script Configuration resource model (in Resource Manager Client’s Resource Families explorer).

  • Use the Ansible Additional Arguments attribute to specify more parameters that should run along with the ansible-playbook command (e.g. -vvv for easier debugging). The attribute resides in Resource Manager Client>Resource Families explorer>Configuration Services. For details about supported arguments, see the official Ansible documentation.

  • To use an Ansible playbook on a Windows VM, make sure WinRM is configured and loaded automatically to allow the playbook to communicate with that VM. A script for this is provided in Enable WinRM on Windows VMs to Support Configuration Management.

  • Error "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Warning: Permanently added '192.168.11.12' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.":

    When you first start using Ansible, by default, it has host verification enabled. This might result in warnings about ssh verification issue. You can disable it by setting a key (in the Ansible config file) or an environment variable: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/inventory_guide/connection_details.html#managing-host-key-checking