Upgrading Ansible Docker Containers to Python 3

Upgrading Ansible Docker Containers to Python 3

Tuesday, Jan 21, 2020
I have discussed this slightly before, however, some background may be necessary. I build a relatively well used Docker container with Ansible. Originally this was all based on Python 2 which was the default Python that is installed with most operating systems. However, this was soon to change! Python 2.7 will reach the end of its life on January 1st, 2020 The longer message that read out when installing using Python 2 was: ...

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Replacing Python 2 with Python 3 in willhallonline/ansible container

Replacing Python 2 with Python 3 in willhallonline/ansible container

Wednesday, Nov 6, 2019
As you may already know I run a relatively successful (in pull terms) Docker container for Ansible; willhallonline/ansible. It has had around 2 million pulls at the moment, and I use it not only for Ansible in my local machine, but also for loading Ansible into various CI systems and testing the deployment of Ansible roles and playbooks. However, I was prompted to think of the future of it by this GitHub issue opened python 2. ...

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Scaffolding Ansible Projects

Scaffolding Ansible Projects

Friday, Mar 8, 2019
Scaffolding or structuring your Ansible projects mean that not only do you have a sane way understanding how your projects are put together but you can also look at being able to re-use and extend your DevOps projects. I have also created a project here that you could clone (or download) and reuse as you choose https://gitlab.com/willhallonline/ansible-starter. In the below example I share the tree structure of general Ansible projects and how I use . ...

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Managing Large Numbers of Drupal Sites with Ansible and Drush

Managing Large Numbers of Drupal Sites with Ansible and Drush

Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Our latest Ansible adventure has been the creation of a task structure which we can use to easily manage multiple Drupal websites on multiple servers. It’s easy enough to use the Ansible command module to run drush commands on a bunch of Drupal sites, using the following code (where sites is just a list of Drupal root locations): name: Run drush cc all on each site listed command: "drush cc all chdir=/var/www/{{ item }}" with_items: - sites This is fine if you are only trying to manage sites on a single server, and you could just run this role repeatedly for different servers and change the variable in the playbook to point to a different list of sites. ...

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Ansible Talk at Drupal Cambs

Ansible Talk at Drupal Cambs

Friday, May 1, 2015
This Monday I had the privilege of giving my first talk at the Drupal Cambrdige meetup (@drupalcambs). It was on the subject of using Ansible to provision servers and manage Drupal installations and the slides are embedded below. I had a lot of fun giving the presentation and hopefully it will be the first of many. I just hope the audience had as much of a good time! Just a few accompanying notes for the slides (I didn’t want to overdo it with onscreen text for the presentation, so a lot of it is mainly headlines): ...

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Ansible for Server Monitoring

Ansible for Server Monitoring

Friday, Apr 10, 2015
More Ansible goodness this week. We’ve been working on a basic playbook to set up the innovatively-named Monit monitoring tool to keep an eye on our webservers and give them a kick up the backside if they’re misbehaving. It’s based on a very useful Ansible Galaxy role, pgolm’s Monit, which installs and configures the tool. However, the role’s documentation doesn’t necessarily make it obvious how to get the best from Monit, so here’s an example playbook for monitoring PHP, MySQL and Nginx to get things started: ...

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Embracing Ansible

Embracing Ansible

Tuesday, Mar 24, 2015
Three months ago, we were introduced to the wonders of Ansible at Drupal Camp Brighton. Since then, whenever we’ve had the chance we’ve been working on various Ansible playbooks to automate many of our development and maintenance processes. For a small team like us, Ansible is invaluable. It is reducing the time we need to spend administering our servers and sites exponentially, freeing up extra time for development. Development and testing happen more quickly as well, and we can be more confident about deployment to live running smoothly because of better consistency between our environments. ...

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