Ansible: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Deploying Mezzanine with Ansible

It’s time to write an Ansible playbook to deploy Mezzanine to a server. We’ll go through it step by step, but if you’re the type of person who starts off by reading the last page of a book to see how it ends,¹ you can find the full playbook at the end of this chapter as Example 6-28. It’s also available on GitHub. Check out the README file before trying to run it directly.

I’ve tried to hew as closely as possible to the original Fabric scripts that Mezzanine author Stephen McDonald wrote.²

Listing Tasks in a Playbook

Before we dive into the guts of our playbook, let’s get a high-level view. The ansible-playbook command-line tool supports a flag called --list-tasks. This flag prints out the names of all the tasks in a playbook. It’s a handy way to summarize what a playbook is going to do. Here’s how you use it:

$ ansible-playbook --list-tasks mezzanine.yml

Example 6-1 shows the output for the mezzanine.yml playbook in Example 6-28.

Example 6-1. List of tasks in Mezzanine playbook

playbook: mezzanine.yml play #1 (web): Deploy mezzanine TAGS: [] tasks: install apt packages TAGS: [] create project path TAGS: [] create a logs directory TAGS: [] check out the repository on the host TAGS: [] install Python requirements globally via pip TAGS: [] create project locale TAGS: [] create a DB user TAGS: [] create the database TAGS: [] ensure config path exists TAGS: [] create tls certificates TAGS: [] remove the default nginx config file TAGS: ...