Deploying Webserver on Aws through Ansible!

Venkateshsandupatla

4 min readOct 7, 2020

Task Details:

$ Provision EC2 instance through ansible

$ Retrieve the IP Address os instances using dynamic inventory concept

$ Configure the webserver through ansible

$ create a role for the webserver to customize the instance and deploy the webpage to root directory

Let's begin our task

To contact ansible to was cloud we have to install boto and boto3

pip3 install botopip3 install boto3

Let's create a role for ec2 instance provisioning

ROLE:

Roles let you automatically load related vars_files, tasks, handlers, and other Ansible artifacts based on a known file structure. Once you group your content in roles, you can easily reuse them and share them with other users.

To create a role

ansible-galaxy init rolename

Now we have to write yml file for launching the ec2 instance

I have written variables in other file

For as credentials I have created a vault
Ansible Vault encrypts variables and files so you can protect sensitive content such as passwords or keys rather than leaving it visible as plaintext in playbooks or roles

ansible-vault create --vault-id aws@prompt credentials.yml

Now create a playbook for our role

Now we will run our playbook for launching the instance

ansible-playbook --vault-id aws@prompt playbookname.yml

Now let's check-in AWS console

We have launched the instance, now we have to set up dynamic inventory
For a dynamic inventory, we have to download the dynamic inventory scripts from Github.
These scripts are in python because ansible is built upon python

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/stable-2.9/contrib/inventory

From this URL, we have to download the two files named as ec2.py and ec2.ini
I have used wget command for downloading the scripts
After downloading the scripts, in ec2.py first line write python3
Now make the files executable chmod +x ec2.py , ec2.ini
Now we have to export our aws key

export AWS_REGION=''
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=''
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=''

If we do everything correct we will see the instance IP

ansible all --list-hosts

Now create a role for webserver setup to our instance
Now write yml file for webserver

We have to change the permission of pem key by chmod 400
We have to write in dynamic inventory path in ansible configuration file
Ansible will log in to the ec2 instance using the ec2-user username.
In order to install required packages, it needs permissions and so, we also have to provide the privilege escalation to the user using sudo.