Introduction to Ansible Transcripts
Chapter: Running Playbooks
Lecture: New Users with the group, user and authorized_key Modules
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0:00
Our playbook isn't doing much at this point so let's enhance it so it's executing useful commands on the remote server. We have a fresh server
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where we're logging in via a root user. Typically, that's not a good safety practice. Let's create a new user vr_playbook
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and we'll log in to our server using that new user. Go into the roles Directory, common/tasks and we're going to modify our main.yml file.
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We'll include a second file named new_user, and save that. Now we'll create the new_user.yml file and we're going to write three tasks.
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But first, we'll create a new group, the non-root group then we'll create a user and we'll add it to that group that we just created.
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And then third, we'll add a public key for this new user so that we can log in. For our first task, let's create a non-root user
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and do that with the group module and the name of this will just be deployers. In our next task, we'll add the deployer user to the deployers group.
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And we want this to exist so the state will be present. Now if we write re-run our playbook multiple times Ansible will check to see if deployers
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has already been created. If so, it will simply skip over the step. Or if later, we change the state from present to absent
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it will remove the Deployers group. In our case, we want it to be present. The second task is to create a non-root user.
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We will use User Module for this task. We need to call the new user deployer place into the deployers group that we just created
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and we can set things like the default shell otherwise it's just going to default to sh the old school shell rather than Bash.
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And we want the state of this user to be present. Okay, one more task and then we can try to run this. We're going to use our public key
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and when someone is trying to log into this deployer user that they need the private key that matches this public key.
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And we'll use the authorized key module to add to the deployer user and at present, we want an authorized key to exist.
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And this will be slightly trickier. What we want is, we want the contents of the public key to be saved in the authorized key file.
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So we're going to use some more advanced Jinja which is the templating engine, Jinja syntax to look up the contents of a file
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and that file in my case is stored under /home/matt/first_playbook/first_playbook.pub In your case, that's going to be
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wherever you saved the public key for your first_playbook wherever your working project directory is. So this value instructs Ansible
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to go look up the contents of the file for first_playbook.pub and we want to save that in the authorized key on the remote server.
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All right, I'm going to save this file. Now let's give our playbook a try. Move back up to the top level directory. Looks like everything looks good
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with these three new tasks. And now we should be able to log in on that remote server with our new Deployer user. Let's test this out.
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With SSH, first_playbook, we'll use our private key to deployer@, and then you're going type in the IP address of your remote server.
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And now everything looks good. We didn't need a password because we had our private key. And now we're logged on to our remote server
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using the new user we just created with our playbook.