A way for client to trigger Ansible Playbook?

Question

My task is to automate CentOS installs, including a suite of proprietary software, onto bare metal machines. I've set up a PXE boot server which automates initial install from a Kickstart file and the rest gets passed to an Ansible Playbook.

I've solved all of the above, except I have to be in the server to start the Playbook. I haven't found a good way for the Playbook to start at the request of the client (or perhaps the server-side PXE process can hand it off somehow?), in the hopes that I can cut myself out of the install process.

Answer 1

I thought I would expand on my comment a little bit.

Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, there are a few options you could consider.

Use ansible-pull

The ansible-pull cli fetches a git repository from a remote server and then locally executes ansible-playbook playbook.yml in the top level of that repository.

This means you can drop something like this into your Kickstart %post script:

ansible-pull -U https://server.example.com/playbooks/client-configuration

This is a great solution if your playbook only requires running tasks on the client.

Trigger a playbook run on the server

If your playbook really needs to execute on the server, you could set up a simple web server that would allow clients to trigger the playbook run. In this case, you would embed curl command or similar into your Kickstart %post script:

curl https://my.server.com/trigger-playbook

The trigger-playbook service would take care of triggering a playbook run targeting the appropriate client. This would require you to implement the service yourself (or use something like webhook to handle that task for you).