Base Linux

The primary purpose of this role is bootstrapping a host to allow Ansible tasks to be run against it. It does this by checking if Python is executable on the target host, providing remediation assistance if it isn't, and installing additional requirements to run Ansible tasks against the target host.

The secondary purpose of this role is to install common utilities that most people would want on all servers.

Requirements

Ansible 2.4 or later.

Role Variables

OS specific variable overrides will be read from the vars/ directory. The first OS specific var file found will be loaded, and they are queried in order of descending specificity. For example, Ubuntu 18.04 would check the files in this order:

1. ubuntu-18.04.yml # Distribution name + full version number
2. ubuntu-bionic.yml # Distribution name + release name
3. ubuntu-18.yml # Distribution name + major version number
4. ubuntu.yml # Distribution name
5. debian.yml # OS family name

Example Playbooks

The bootstrapping tasks included in this role typically only need to run once, so they are only ran if you specifically include the bootstrap task list. It's also recommended to tag them with the never tag and an additional tag so that they only run when that additional tag is used.

# Make sure all the hosts are bootstrapped. Only runs if the 'bootstrap' tag is used
- hosts: all
  gather_facts: false
  tags: ['never', 'bootstrap']
  tasks:
    - include_role:
        name: base-linux
        tasks_from: bootstrap

# The rest of your playbook
- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - include_role:
        name: base-linux

The example above will run the main task list for every play, but the bootstrap task list will only run if the bootstrap tag is used. For example:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tags=bootstrap