Using Ansible to configure fresh Debian machines

I’ve been tinkering with a self-hosted Gitlab instance to learn a bit more about their CI/CD tooling and to practice with a vertically integrated set of tools overall. I set up my controller and runner on Debian 10 virtual machines running on an ESXI host. I first leaned toward using Gitlab’s provided Docker containers to spin up and deploy Gitlab runners–but the main software project I’m working on is a webapp acting as a front-end for libvirt called KVM Conjurer.

It seems to me like more trouble than it is worth to get a containerized libvirt deployment set up–at least for now. Instead I decided to use the shell Gitlab executor. My main concern was reproduceability of working test and eployment machines. So I quickly put together some Ansible playbooks to take a fresh new Debian 10 install and bring it up to the baseline necessary to build and run KVM Conjurer and to host a few minimal VMs locally to enable automated testing as part of the CI pipeline provided and configured in Gitlab.

Here are the details of the first playbook:

- name: install sudo, vim, .vimrc, add my user to sudoers, and install open-vm-tools
  remote_user: root
  hosts: all

  tasks:
      - name: install sudo
        apt:
            name: sudo
            update_cache: yes

      - name: add tyler to sudoers
        user:
            name: tyler
            groups: sudo
            append: yes

. . . 

This file does a few things to make a new minimal Debian install more liveable. First, it installs sudo and adds the non-root user I create during installation to the sudoers usergroup. This uses the ansible.builtin.apt and ansible.builtin.user modules to make that configuration.

From here, I install several more utilities (vim, git, etc). I’ve elided that to show two more Ansible modules in use.

. . .
      - name: pull vimrc from git
        become: yes
        become_user: tyler
        git:
            dest: /home/tyler/.vim_runtime
            repo: 'https://github.com/amix/vimrc.git'
            depth: 1

      - name: install basic vimrc
        become: yes
        become_user: tyler
        copy:
            src: /home/tyler/.vim_runtime/vimrcs/basic.vim
            dest: /home/tyler/.vimrc

This snippet shows the use of the ansible.builtin.git and ansible.bulitin.copy utlities. Since I don’t have much of a custom .vimrc put together for myself, I grab and install a basic .vimrc from Todoist founder Amir Salihefendic.

I’ll shortly write up my next two playbooks: one to prepare a machine to act as a Gitlab runner and one that prepares a machine to build and run KVM Conjurer.

Tags: ansible infrastructure-as-code gitlab linux