Hi all,
I’m writing a playbook to install check_mk.
There are packages in the Ubuntu repos but they are old. The developers provide up to date debs, so currently I use the copy module to drop the deb on the target then execute dpkg using the command module with creates=/path/to/installed/exe to give me some idempotancy.
Does this seem a reasonable course of action? It seems to work… Certainly the play shows skipped the second time it’s run. Does anyone do anything ‘cooler’ in the same situation? 
I’m thinking about upgrades, with no package manager, the best I can think of is to store the current output of running the agent with --version in a var file, then when running the playbook run the agent on the target with --version and only do the upgrade if they’re different. I reckon that ought to work…
Has anyone done anything like this?
Hi all,
I'm writing a playbook to install check_mk.
There are packages in the Ubuntu repos but they are old. The developers
provide up to date debs, so currently I use the copy module to drop the deb
on the target then execute dpkg using the command module with
creates=/path/to/installed/exe to give me some idempotancy.
Does this seem a reasonable course of action? It seems to work... Certainly
the play shows skipped the second time it's run. Does anyone do anything
'cooler' in the same situation?
The 'best' method is create an APT repository on a HTTP-server and add your repository key
so it is trusted and add a file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and use apt-get to install it.
It might take some time to set up a repository the first time, though.
In all cases the package will need to be named like 0.9.7.7irvine1 so it does not clash
on upgrades.
0.9.7.7irvine1 is considered a higher version than 0.9.7.7 by apt/dpkg
reprepo can be used to setup your personal repository; see:
http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/setting-up-a-personal-debian-repository
as a reference.
That's really helpful, thanks very much!