Cyclosible

Cyclosible is a project backed by Cycloid in order to manage Ansible with a REST API.

The goal of Cyclosible is to be a lightweight application opensourced as a free alternative to Ansible Tower.

Cyclosible is used internally at Cycloid to let our customers use their own CI and interact with our deployment stack.

Technologies used

Cyclosible is built upon these technologies:

• Django
• Django REST Framework
• Celery
• Redis
• S3

Prerequisite

Install REDIS

To start with Cyclosible, you will need to install redis. For this we suggest to create a redis docker container

Create Virtual Environment

First, install virtualenv:

sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

Then, create the virtualenv:

mkvirtualenv cyclosible27 --no-site-packages -p /usr/bin/python2.7

I suggest here to install python 2.7 as ansible does not support python 3 yet.

Now, to work in your virtual environment, you can enable it with:

workon cyclosible27

Install required packages

You will need to clone this repository. Then you will be able to install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configure the S3 bucket

Actually the S3 bucket is mandatory. In the future we will try to make it optional or provide a plugin system to write your own storage.

You will need to activate the Website Hosting on your S3 bucket, and apply this permission (where cycloid-cyclosible is the name of your bucket):

{
  "Version":"2012-10-17",
  "Statement":[{
    "Sid":"PublicReadGetObject",
        "Effect":"Allow",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action":["s3:GetObject"],
      "Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::cycloid-cyclosible/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Configure the application

For this step, you will have to edit the cyclosible/Cyclosible/settings.py file, and configure these parameters:

• BROKER_URL = 'redis://localhost:6379/0'
• CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = 'redis://localhost:6379/0'
• CELERY_TIMEZONE = 'Europe/Paris'
• SECRET_KEY = 'random string'
• PLAYBOOK_PATH = "/home/ansible_playbook_path/"
• S3_BUCKET = "cycloid-cyclosible"
• S3_ACCESS_KEY = "XXXXXXXXXXX"
• S3_SECRET_KEY = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

Before starting the application, we need to create the database. You can also configure the DATABASE settings, by default it will create a SQLite3 database. Please refer to the django website (link is above this parameter) to configure it correctly.

Then, apply the schema:

<cyclosible_path>/manage.py migrate

It will populate the database. Then you need to create a superuser:

<cyclosible_path>/manage.py createsuperuser

Start the application

The best way to run the application on production is to use supervisord.

There are 3 applications to start :

• This one will start the webserver (DEV mode):

<cyclosible_path>/manage.py runserver

• This one will start the worker which will run the playbook:

<cyclosible_path>/manage.py celery worker

• This one will check if there are some tasks ton run on crontabs (actually optional):

<cyclosible_path>/manage.py celery beat

Now you should be able to connect on the admin interface: http://<yourip>:8000/admin/

Development

All unit tests are run with tox:

pip install tox

Then, run tox at the root of the project:

tox