Repository of community playbooks? (Looking for examples or better for AWS provisioning)

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I am new to ansible, and also new to Amazon AWS, and I would like to use ansible (or a combination of ansible and vagrant) to:

  1. create a new ec2 instance
  2. provision that instance with a variety of
  • installations of “well known packages” (node.js, postgres, etc.)
  • customizations of these packages
  • customizations of the server itself

It seems as though all of that certainly falls under the scope of ansible, and it does seem to be documented. Regardless, I am still a bit lost at where to begin.

What I was hoping to find, was that my relatively trivial beginner needs would have been already created in one or more playbooks stored in some sort of community respository.

And I guess I’ve been a bad googler, because I haven’t found a good repository of ansible playbooks.

So if you can, can you let me know:

  • Is there some community repository of playbooks? If so, where?
  • If I need to built it myself, is what I’ve described something that needs or could benefit from vagrant? Or is it best done at the moment with ansible alone?
    Thanks,
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Hi Jerry,

I’ve discussed this several times.

Generally, what we are encouraging is github.com/ansible/ansible-examples, which are relatively real world full-use-case examples of deploying whole stacks of things in real-life operating environments.

There have been some interest in having some sort of repository for everybody to share, and a few attempts at organizing, and I really think these are potentially sketchy for a few reasons, namely the trend that you can usually find some content that works for some use cases and isn’t complete, or doesn’t work for your OS, etc. I’ve heard these described as “a great resource for what to do and what not to do”.

Generally our philosophy has been (A) go batteries included with the modules, so you don’t have to hurt for things that work for you and have all the basic primatives you need, (B) make it really easy to put modules together into playbooks by keeping the language simple.

What I have been thinking about lately though, it is it might make sense to have a facility for sharing Ansible roles, which are plugable, and this may be something we do in the future, but I’d want some kind of nice software interface around it. I suspect that might be something we tackle this year.

Until then, definitely take a look at ansible examples for some playbooks, and we definitely welcome folks to contribute examples to it!

–Michael

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Thanks Michael, for the information,

I definitely want to incorporate ansible into my processes, just trying to figure out where to start.