Execute Ansible playbooks in Terraform main.tf file

Archives Ansible Project
1

Hi,

Is there a way to execute Ansible playbooks in Terraform main.tf file? For example I want to deploy nginx webserver inside GCP GCE VM Instance using Ansible playbook once GCP GCE VM Instance is provisioned using Terraform.

Please guide. Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

Kaushal

2

Hi Kausal,

Depending on the provider, you can use cloud-init to:

  • Invoke an installation of Ansible

  • Download the Ansible code

  • Run the code from a local installed instance of Ansible

  • Rilindo

3

Thanks Rilindo for the quick response and much appreciated. I will appreciate if you can provide me with a basic working example to understand it and I will implement it once i play around with it. Thanks in Advance.

Best Regards,

Kaushal

4

Hi Rilindo,

I am using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - Google Cloud as my primary cloud service provider. Please guide. Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

Kaushal

5

Hi Kaushal,

You would want to review the Terraform documentation for google_compute_instance - likely metadata_startup_script is your answer:

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/compute_instance#metadata_startup_script

Any more this goes beyond the scope of this mailing list, so I would recommend reaching to appropriate Hashicorp or GCP resources for more help.

  • Rilindo
6

Hi Kausal,

Depending on the provider, you can use cloud-init to:

- Invoke an installation of Ansible
- Download the Ansible code
- Run the code from a local installed instance of Ansible

- Rilindo

I've done this myself, especially to use consistent playbooks for
docker and Terraform and other virtualization tools without a shared
Ansible server. Not to *never* install the ansible package this way,
only install "ansible-core", because the ansible package is a bulky
conglomeration of roughly 100 add-on packages, none or nearly none of
which are of any use to such a micro ansible setup. Installing the
"ansible" package slows such installations quite a lot and soaks up
space not needed for a VM or docker image at all.

Nico Kadel-Garcia