Submitted by Dale on November 11, 2020 - 11:09am
Checklvst, https://checkvist.com, is a web-based list editor (I like its keyboard-driven user experience). Given some of my Ansible playbooks generate to-do lists and Checklvst has an API, I wondered how hard integration could be?
Submitted by Dale on October 19, 2020 - 9:13pm
After using Ansible as a personal DevOps tool for a couple of months, here are some impressions.
Context
- Outside of work (web development) I look after six Drupal 7 and WordPress sites on shared hosting
- My local development is done on a MacBook using apache (with some dabbling in Lando/Docker). I've done some wildcarding with dnsmasq and vhosts to streamline local dev site configuration. CMS code is in git repos.
- My Ansible work is a personal project and I'm the only stakeholder
- I learned Ansible doing this work
Submitted by Dale on October 1, 2020 - 1:17pm
Ansible variables are evaluated each time they're used. This means the following playbook vars declaration will always return the current time where ever it's used in the playbook!:
vars:
timestamp: "{{ lookup('pipe', 'date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M') }}"
This is not the desired situation if the timestamp is used as part of a filename. For example: filename: "backup-{{timestamp}}.sql".
Fortunately, there's an easy solution.
Submitted by Dale on September 21, 2020 - 11:55am
Ansible is an open source IT automation tool. I tend to describe it as a task-runner with a host database (which Ansible calls the inventory). A big selling point is no agent software is needed on managed remote hosts. Details at the Ansible website: https://www.ansible.com/use-cases
tl;dr: If you're just beginning with Ansible this might help: https://github.com/dale42/ansible-starter
