Ansible collection: tina_pm.playbooks

This is an opinionated collection of playbooks and variable templates using roles from the tina_pm.common collection as well as various third-party roles.

There are many strong assumptions that might not be useful for many people, but that make life much easier if followed.

Non-exhaustive list of assumptions

• Hosts run on Debian.
• Tools such as cloud-init, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved, are not used.
• Network configuration uses ifupdown.
• Per-host firewalls use ferm and iptables.
• All hosts belong to the site group, where non-reusable settings are defined.

For the reusable variable definitions to be useful, the user needs to be able to override them when necessary. The default Ansible configuration does not allow this, as this collection ships variables in playbook context, which have higher precedence than other context.

So to use this collection properly you need to change the (group) variable precedence rules, so that variables defined in the inventory or in inventory context override variables defined in playbook context.

NOTE: Ansible does not allow changing host (as opposed to group) variable precedence, so those follow the default rules: playbook host_vars override inventory host_vars, which override inventory-file host variables. Avoid re-defining host variables in multiple contexts.

Sample ansible.cfg snippet:

# Change the *group* variable precedence rules so that inventory file group
# variables override inventory-context group_vars, and those override
# playbook-context group_vars.
precedence = all_plugins_play, all_plugins_inventory, all_inventory,
    groups_plugins_play, groups_plugins_inventory, groups_inventory

# Set the playbook context for non-playbook CLIs, to load group variables
# defined alongside playbooks.
playbook_dir = .collections/ansible_collections/tina_pm/playbooks/playbooks/

Features

• Most features and functionality are enabled either by group membership (e.g. apache_servers) or by a boolean variable (e.g. ferm__enable).
• Templates are provided to allow cumulative definitions for many structured configuration variables, using commong prefixes (e.g. Unless overriden, apt__packages_to_install is constructed by concatenanting all variables named apt__packages_to_install__*).
• A simple system to define full ifupdown-based network configuration is provided.
• Whenever possible, variables are prefixed by their associated role name, followed by 2 underscores.