Provisioning with Ansible within the Vagrant guest

I’ve been setting up a Vagrant VM for use with some client projects and picked Ansible to do this. Firstly, I played with the Ansible provisioner, but found it a little slow and then I realised that Ansible doesn’t run on Windows.

Rather than migrate what I’d done to Puppet, Evan recommended that I look into running Ansible on the guest instead and provided some hints. This turned out to be quite easy.

These are the steps when starting from the ubuntu/trusty64 base box.

Use the Shell provisioner

As we’re running Ansible on the guest, we use the shell provisioner, so my Vagrantfile contains:

config.vm.provision :shell,
  :keep_color => true,
  :inline => "export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 && export ANSIBLE_FORCE_COLOR=1 && cd /vagrant/provisioning && ./init.sh"

This simply tells Vagrant to run init.sh which is stored in the provisioning directory of my project.

I immediately noticed a warning when running vagrant up: “stdin: is not a tty error”. This is due to the way Ubuntu tries to echo a message to a shell that isn’t interactive. To get rid of this, we need to configure Vagrant’s ssh shell to be a non-login one in the Vagrantfile:

config.ssh.shell = "bash -c 'BASH_ENV=/etc/profile exec bash'"

init.sh

Our shell provisioner needs to do two things:

1. Install Ansible
2. Run our playbook

So, init.sh looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

if [ $(dpkg-query -W -f='${Status}' ansible 2>/dev/null | grep -c "ok installed") -eq 0 ];
then
    echo "Add APT repositories"
    export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
    apt-get install -qq software-properties-common &> /dev/null || exit 1
    apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible &> /dev/null || exit 1

    apt-get update -qq

    echo "Installing Ansible"
    apt-get install -qq ansible &> /dev/null || exit 1
    echo "Ansible installed"
fi

cd /vagrant/provisioning
ansible-playbook setup.yml --connection=local

Obviously, we only want to install Ansible once, so we check the output of dpkg-query and only install if it’s not already installed. Installation is easy enough: we just use apt-get to add install what we need (quietly!) from the ansible ppa as per the docs.

Once Ansible is installed, we can run ansible-playbook with the --connnection-local switch to run out playbook, setup.yml in my case.

At this point, it’s all standard Ansible all the way for your provisioning. It’s just faster and works with Windows.