Setting up an Ansible Server on AWS EC2 instance

To setup Ansible server on EC2 instance we need to first launch an EC2 instance and SSH into it. Now follow the below commands to install Ansible on it.

• yum update -y
• rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm (On Redhat image)
• yum install ansible -y (On Amazon Linux image)
• amazon-linux-extras install ansible2
• ansible --version

##Create ansadmin user and update its password 
useradd ansadmin
passwd ansadmin

##Add ansadmin user to sudoers group
echo "ansadmin ALL=(ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

##sed command replaces "PasswordAuthentication no to yes" without editing sshd_config file
sed -ie 's/PasswordAuthentication no/PasswordAuthentication yes/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

##create ssh keys for password-less authentication between Ansible control server and hosts.

#Login as ansadmin user and generate ssh key on Master
ssh-keygen

#Create same ansadmin user on the target host server.

#Copy Master ssh keys onto all ansible hosts nodes
ssh-copy-id <target-host-server>

#Update target servers IP on /etc/ansible/hosts file on Master (Always use internal Private IP address)
echo "<target host server IP>" >> /etc/ansible/hosts

Ansible hosts file should look like: cat /etc/ansible/hosts

[web-servers]

10.0.1.20

10.0.1.21

10.0.1.22

#Run ansible command as ansadmin user on Control server. It should be successful.
ansible all -m ping


We have now setup a successful passwordless authentication between all the hosts and the control server from where we can handle any type of tasks like installing any application, starting/stopping any service, copying a config file on servers.
This we will discuss in our next blog.