Ansible in Jenkins

Ansible is a powerful tool for automation of your IT infrastructure. In contrast to chef or puppet it does not need much infrastructure like a server and client (“agent”) programs on your target machines. We like to use it for keeping our servers and desktop machines up-to-date and provisioned in a defined, repeatable and self-documented way.

As of late ansible has begun to replace our different, custom-made – but already automated – deployment processes we implemented using different tools like ant scripts run by jenkins-jobs. The natural way of using ansible for deployment in our current infrastructure would be using it from jenkins with the jenkins ansible plugin.

Even though the plugin supports the “Global Tool Configuration” mechanism and automatic management of several ansible installations it did not work out of the box for us:

At first, the executable path was not set correctly. We managed to fix that but then the next problem arose: Our standard build slaves had no jinja2 (python templating library) installed. Sure, that are problems you can easily fix if you decide so.

For us, it was too much tinkering and snowflaking our build slaves to be feasible and we took another route, that you can consider: Running ansible from an docker image.

We already have a host for running docker containers attached to jenkins so our current state of deployment with ansible roughly consists of a Dockerfile and a Jenkins job to run the container.

The Dockerfile is as simple as

FROM ubuntu:14.04
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade && apt-get -y install software-properties-common
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible-2.4
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y install ansible

# Setup work dir
WORKDIR /project/provisioning

# Copy project directory into container
COPY . /project

# Deploy the project
CMD ansible-playbook -i inventory deploy-project.yml

And the jenkins build step to actually run the deployment looks like

docker build -t project-deploy .
docker run project-deploy

That way we can tailor our deployment machine to conveniently run our ansible playbooks for the specific project without modifying our normal build slave setups and adding complexity on their side. All the tinkering with the jenkins ansible plugin is unnecessary going this way and relying on docker and what the container provides for running ansible.