This is a Vagrant/Virtualbox set of scripts for experimenting with Ansible in a disposable/recreatable environment.

Vagrant is very finicky software, but these versions seem to work for this setup, while newer versions don't. When the newer versions have the bugs ironed out, I hope to upgrade these links.

• Install prereqs (Windows 7):

  • Virtualbox 5.0.40. It looks like the latest version of Virtualbox is also work (5.1.22)
  • Vagrant 1.8.7

• Download (or clone this repo).

• cd <directory of this repo>

• vagrant up

That will build two boxes- ansible-control and target. ansible-control has Ansible installed, this repo on it, and some other light provisioning (see ./ansible_control.yaml ). target1 is a blank slate. It will take quite a while to download, import, and provision the boxes, so get a coffee.

If you get a VirtualBox error, try it again and then try uninstalling your Virtualbox and updating to a newer version. Maybe that will help.

• From Windows, SSH to 127.0.0.1 port 2222 with username vagrant and password vagrant
• From ansible-control, ssh to target1 with username vagrant and password vagrant to add the key to the known_hosts list.
• type exit to exit target1
• type cd ~/ansible_control to change directories to where your ansible files are.

ansible -i hosts -k -m ping all

Now you should be able to start writing playbooks and testing them against target1 (and ansible-control if you want)

• Ansible
• Vim
  • Vim is a text editor that I use to write playbooks. To go through the tutorial, type vimtutor in the console.
• Linux - this is just a link to a tutorial I found online. There are others, and randomly googling is helpful here too. If you need help for a specific command, type man <command> to pull up the manual. If you don't know the command, type man -k <keyword> to search the man pages. Googling is generally faster though.

Virtualbox and Vagrant offer ways to sync folders, but I haven't been able to get any of them to work reliably on Windows. Instead I use a git repo to save my work.

When you're done for the day, type vagrant halt from Windows to kill the VM. Type vagrant up to restart it.

If you screw something up or you want to start over, make sure your work is saved and type vagrant destroy to destroy the VM. To create a new one, type vagrant up again.

• Set up synced folder for ansible projects (probably won't fix)
• Use SSH keys instead of passwords so I don't have to use -k