Using Ansible for Application Deployment

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1

I’ve been using Ansible for a few years, mostly for server provisioning and configuration management. I think it’s a fantastic tool. For a new project, I’ve also begun to attempt to use Ansible as a web application deployment tool where I would have previously used ant. However, there are a couple of snags that have me questioning whether the Ansible model is the best fit for this type of task.

For example, the first thing I want to is download the deployment artefact from Jenkins. This is only available internally, so my plan was to download locally and then upload to the production servers. I quickly realised that this was totally different to anything I’d done before as I was trying to perform a task that wasn’t really associated with any remote hosts. After a bit of searching, I found this:

  • hosts: 127.0.0.1

connection: local

Which works perfectly well, and could have been designed for exactly this type of task, but it feels a bit like trying to fit a round peg in to a square hole. I understand that since all modules assume that they are executing within the context of a host, there is really no other way it could be, but it got me thinking if Ansible is a good place to write these type of non-host specific, pre-deployment steps?

The next challenge then was to have the play book prompt the user for the job and build to deploy. var_prompt seemed perfect for this, so I ended up with a playbook like so:

  • hosts: 127.0.0.1
    connection: local
    vars_prompt:
    jenkins_job: “Job Name”
    jenkins_build: “Build Number”
    roles:

  • jenkinsfetch

  • hosts: dashboards
    roles:

  • { role: uploadapp, app_name: ‘dashboard’ }

Which seemed to work well until I tried to reference jenkins_job and jenkins_build from within the uploadapp role and couldn’t:

TASK: [uploadapp | upload build tar] ***************************************
fatal: [local.dev] => One or more undefined variables: ‘jenkins_job’ is undefined

FATAL: all hosts have already failed – aborting

I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to make these variables visible across the plays but couldn’t. I tried set_fact, which didn’t work as it’s host specific. I tried to include both roles within the same play but couldn’t (obviously as I don’t want to run uploadapp on 127.0.0.1) and finally just resolved to put the variables as part of a global var file rather than prompt for them. I can workaround this works, but it feels to me like I’m trying to make Ansible do something it really doesn’t want to.

The variable problem also came up when I wanted to abbreviate some paths within my jenkinsfetch role:

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Yeah so vars_prompt is local to a specific play (remember here you can have multiple plays in a playbook).

I’m wondering if you could, or would want to pass the prompted values to your jenkinsfetch role though?

I use set_fact to set facts which aren’t just true for the current host in some cases.

Interested to hear what others do though.

Jon