Hacks for When Ansible Galaxy Isn't Working

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

As of late I have manually bootstrapped a handful of machines into production using a text file with some command lines. Yes this is a crap ass way to do it but one of the key things, Docker, is a damn pain in the ass to install. Here’s what I was using as the command lines:

sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository \
   "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
   $(lsb_release -cs) \
   stable"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce
sudo apt install docker-compose
sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
sudo systemctl enable docker

Even for me that’s damn ugly – so it is clearly time for Ansible. Ansible is a machine provisioning tool that lets you reduce commands like the above to something short, sweet and idempotent. For this particular thing I wanted to use Nick Janetakis’ Ansible Galaxy role to make installing this trivial. Specifically I wanted what his blog post promises:

- { role: nickjj.docker, tags docker}

which is all you need to setup Docker. And that’s actually what I got but I hit a few snags hence the workaround.

The problem that I hit was that his ansible galaxy role has some kind of version control conflict so that the version that gets installed when you type:

ansible-galaxy install nickjj.docker

is actually the version from November 2016, not the current 17.xx version. What I needed was the master version of the Github repo not the older tagged version. A bit of googling and some interactions with Nick told me just clone it directly into my own project as a work around. Here’s how I did that:

# Change into the right directory
cd ~/me/fuzzygroup/hyde/seira_watch/ansible/roles

git clone git@github.com:nickjj/ansible-docker.git

This created an ansible-docker folder in my roles directory and all that I needed to make it work was to change the nickjj.docker reference to:

- { role: ansible-docker, tags docker}

Nick also helpfully pointed out that I could have also cloned to tmp and then renamed to nickjj-docker before copying it over and that would have worked just fine tool. Thanks Nick!

Note 1: Another workaround supposedly would be to make a requirements.yml file and specify the branch there but I’m less certain on how to do that.

Note 2: I talked about this same type of problem once before.