fedora-server-setup

Provision basic Fedora server

Fedora bare-minimal server, packages installed afterwards. Goal is to create auto-installation scripts and maintain with Ansible.

Configuration management with Ansible

The playbook (fedora-server-setup.yaml) is a collection of tasks that confgiures a minimal Fedora server. The playbook reads the different variable - such as packages to install, and services to enable - from fedora-server-vars.yaml. Adding additional packages or services is as simple as adding a new line to the appropriate list in fedora-server-vars.yaml.

Installing Ansible

Always install from pip:

pip install ansible

Requirements

The playbook requires community.general and ansible.posix collections. Install them with:

ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml --upgrade

Variables

The following variables are defined in fedora-server-vars.yaml:

• dnf_packages: list of packages to install with dnf
• dnf_groups: list of groups to install with dnf (could be added under dnf_packages as well, but cleaner to separate packages and groups)
• sys_services: list of services to enable and start with systemd

Additionally the following variables are prompted for during the playbook execution:

• target_host: the host to configure with ansible. Hostname as defined in the inventory.
• target_hostname: the hostname to set on the target host.

Running the playbook

Make sure that an inventory file is prepared either in an ini or a yaml format.

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini fedora-server-setup.yaml

Overwriting variables

The play will read variables from fedora-server-vars.yaml. To overwrite a variable, use the -e flag on the cli (hierarchically cli passed variables will overwrite the ones defined in the file):

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini fedora-server-setup.yaml -e "dnf_packages=[\"package1\", \"package2\"]"

To Do

• Turn the playbook into a role
• Github Actions
  • for checking yaml syntax (yamllint)
  • for testing the playbook against a Fedora VM