Problem

The following describes the process of trying out Ansible Tower locally using an installation of Fedora 25.

Notable

  • Make sure you enable Legacy/CSM Boot Support in UEFI Firmware (BIOS).
  • CentOS 7/6/5 and Red Hat (RHEL) 7/6/5 needs EPEL repository.
  • If you want to install vagrant via dnf, first follow Gems installation.

Solution

Use Ansible’s official Vagrant box to quickly build an Ansible Tower VM.

  1. Get the most current version of all packages.

     dnf clean all
 rm -rf /var/cache/dnf/*
 dnf makecache fast
 dnf update -y
 dnf autoremove -y

  2. Install VirtualBox.

     # Install dependency packages
 dnf install gcc make kernel-devel -y

 # Enable VirtualBox repo
 pushd /etc/yum
 wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo
 popd

 # Install latest version
 dnf install VirtualBox-5.1 -y

 # Add user account to the VirtualBox group
 usermod -a -G vboxusers $USER

  3. Install Vagrant.

     # Import GPG key
 wget https://keybase.io/hashicorp/pgp_keys.asc -O hashicorp.asc
 rpm --import hashicorp.asc

 # Get RPM package
 wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.0.0/vagrant_2.0.0_x86_64.rpm

 # Check RPM package signature
 rpm --checksig vagrant_2.0.0_x86_64.rpm

 # Install RPM package
 rpm --install vagrant_2.0.0_x86_64.rpm

 # Otherwise, if you installed gems from Fedora official repo (see notables above)
 dnf install -y vagrant

  4. Set environment variables.

     # Set the Vagrant default provider to VirtualBox.
 export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=virtualbox

  5. Create a personal directory for saving Ansible Tower’s Vagrantfile.

     # Create a new directory with name path
 mkdir -p $HOME/virt/ansible-tower/2.1.4

  6. Change into the newly created directory and execute the following vagrant commands:

     pushd $HOME/virt/ansible-tower/2.1.4

 # Create a new Vagrantfile using the Tower base box from Ansible
 varant init tower http://vms.ansible.com/ansible-tower-2.1.4-virtualbox.box

 # Build the Tower VM.
 vagrant up

 # Log into the VM, and Tower will display a message
 # with connection information
 vagrant ssh

  7. Visit the URL provided by the login welcome message (something like https://10.42.0.42/), and after confirming a security exception for the Ansible Tower certificate, login with the credentials from Step 6.

  8. At this point, you will need to register a free trial license of Ansible Tower following the instructions on the screen. The free trial allows you to use all of Tower’s features for up to 10 servers, and is great for experimenting and seeing how Tower fits into your workflow. After you get the license (it’s a block of JSON which you paste into the license field), you should get to Tower’s default dashboard page.

Summary

Ansible Tower is centered around the idea of organizing Projects (which run your playbooks via Jobs) and Inventories (which describe the servers on which your playbooks should be run) inside of Organizations. Organizations are then set up with different levels of access based on Users and Credentials grouped in different Teams.

You should now be ready to get hands-on with Ansible Tower.

Resources