Thursday, Mar 2, 2023
Just released v4.3.2 of Docker Ansible 😆 . A few changes (rolled from previous v4.3.* releases which then were fixed over the next 2). Bringing in RockyLinux 9, Alpine 3.17 as new base images 🆕 , dropping Alpine 3.12, Alpine 3.13 and Debian Stretch as EOL 🧟♂️ .
I still have longer-term ambitions to move this to being multi-stage builds (with multi-architecture at some point). Multi-arch is harder just due to the build times as using linux/amd64 for runners to build linux/arm64/v8 takes a long time. 😑
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Tuesday, Jun 28, 2022
Last week, v4.1.1 was released on my Docker Ansible project:
New contributors who added Alpine 3.16 and Ubuntu 22.04 bringing OS versions up to 17 (need to drop old Alpine versions soon) Added recent Ansible versions to the immutable tags in Docker Hub + GitLab Registry (2.11 and 2.12 has a few versions to build) Down to only 1 issue in GitHub (0 in GitLab) Now with pinned versions for Ansible-Lint and Mitogen to resolve dependency hell Made a funny little logo (need to probably make a different one).
Monday, Feb 7, 2022
A major rewrite of my Docker Ansible project to make it easier to manage Ansible versions inside the projects. For users of the containers, it should be no difference, however, it makes it easier if you want a specific version of Ansible running inside your CI/CD pipelines.
Seems a bit weird linking it to GitHub, but that is pretty much where the community views it (although technically that is just a mirror of the GitLab repo Docker Ansible.
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Friday, Jun 11, 2021
Docker Hub will be [removing Autobuild for free users from June 18th(https://www.docker.com/blog/changes-to-docker-hub-autobuilds/)]. I have recently (about 3 weeks) transitioned away from Autobuild for my biggest container project (Docker Ansible) and actually have been nicely surprised that building with GitLab has resulted in build completing quicker and with better error handling.
It does seem a bit of another end of an era for Docker Hub as initially, I used it for all of my container builds. I guess maybe we can’t have nice things because of crypto miners.
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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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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 2.7 reaches end of life in 2 months.
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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 .gitmodules to pull in community and internal roles for managing projects.
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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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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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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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