Using Ansible to set up a workstation

Ansible is  an extremely popular open-source configuration management and software automation project. While IT professionals almost certainly use Ansible on a daily basis, its influence outside the IT industry is not as wide. Ansible is a powerful and flexible tool. It is easily applied to a task common to nearly every desktop computer user: the post-installation “checklist”.

Most users like to apply one “tweak” after a new installation. Ansible’s idempotent, declarative syntax lends itself perfectly to describing how a system should be configured.

Ansible in a nutshell

The ansible program itself performs a single task against a set of hosts. This is roughly conceptualized as:

for HOST in $HOSTS; do
    ssh $HOST /usr/bin/echo "Hello World"
done

To perform more than one task, Ansible defines the concept of a “playbook”. A playbook is a YAML file describing the state of the targeted machine. When run, Ansible inspects each host and performs only the tasks necessary to enforce the state defined in the playbook.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Echo "Hello World"
      command: echo "Hello World"

Run the playbook using the ansible-playbook command:

$ ansible-playbook ~/playbook.yml

Configuring a workstation

Start by installing ansible:

dnf install ansible

Next, create a file to store the playbook:

touch ~/post_install.yml

Start by defining the host on which to run this playbook. In this case, “localhost”:

- hosts: localhost

Each task consists of a name field and a module field. Ansible has a lot of modules. Be sure to browse the module index to become familiar with all Ansible has to offer.

The package module

Most users install additional packages after a fresh install, and many like to remove some shipped software they don’t use. The package module provides a generic wrapper around the system package manager (in Fedora’s case, dnf).

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: Install Builder
      become: yes
      package:
        name: gnome-builder
        state: present
    - name: Remove Rhythmbox
      become: yes
      package:
        name: rhythmbox
        state: absent
    - name: Install GNOME Music
      become: yes
      package:
        name: gnome-music
        state: present
    - name: Remove Shotwell
      become: yes
      package:
        name: shotwell
        state: absent

This playbook results in the following outcomes:

• GNOME Builder and GNOME Music are installed
• Rhythmbox is removed
• On Fedora 28 or greater, nothing happens with Shotwell (it is not in the default list of packages)
• On Fedora 27 or older, Shotwell is removed

This playbook also introduces the become: yes directive. This specifies the task must be run by a privileged user (in most cases, root).

The DConf Module

Ansible can do a lot more than install software. For example, GNOME includes a great color-shifting feature called Night Light. It ships disabled by default, however the Ansible dconf module can very easily enable it.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: Enable Night Light
      dconf:
        key: /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/color/night-light-enabled
        value: true
    - name: Set Night Light Temperature
      dconf:
        key: /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/color/night-light-temperature
        value: uint32 5500

Ansible can also create files at specified locations with the copy module. In this example, a local file is copied to the destination path.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: Enable "AUTH_ADMIN_KEEP" for pkexec
      become: yes
      copy:
        src: files/51-pkexec-auth-admin-keep.rules
        dest: /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/51-pkexec-auth-admin-keep.rules

The Command Module

Ansible can still run commands even if no specialized module exists (via the aptly named command module). This playbook enables the Flathub repository and installs a few Flatpaks. The commands are crafted in such a way that they are effectively idempotent. This is an important behavior to consider; a playbook should succeed each time it is run on a machine.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: Enable Flathub repository
      become: yes
      command: flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
    - name: Install Fractal
      become: yes
      command: flatpak install --assumeyes flathub org.gnome.Fractal
    - name: Install Spotify
      become: yes
      command: flatpak install --assumeyes flathub com.spotify.Client

Combine all these tasks together into a single playbook and, in one command, Ansible will customize a freshly installed workstation. Not only that, but 6 months later, after making changes to the playbook, run it again to bring a “seasoned” install back to a known state.

$ ansible-playbook -K ~/post_install.yml

This article only touched the surface of what’s possible with Ansible. A follow-up article will go into more advanced Ansible concepts such as roles, configuring multiple hosts with a divided set of responsibilities.