Ansible Integration

Configure and deploy Ansible playbooks with env zero for automated configuration management

Ansible is an open-source automation tool for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. Ansible uses simple YAML-based playbooks to define tasks, making it easy to automate complex processes.

Supported Versions

env zero supports all standard Ansible versions from 3.0.0 and above.

Environment Deployment

In order to manage your Ansible runs in env zero, you must follow these steps:

1. Create an Ansible Template first
2. Optionally - Create env0.yml file in the target repository to run any custom command (ansible or otherwise). This is also needed to run commands during the destroy process
3. Connect your cloud account
4. Create an environment

Execution Steps

Beyond the common steps such as Clone, Loading variables, Deploy/Destroy, etc., Ansible environments offers the following execution steps:

1. Ansible Galaxy - ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
2. Ansible Check Playbook - ansible-playbook --check --diff

Note

Using check_mode: false will cause Ansible code to be deployed prematurely. It can cause regular Deployments still pending approval, Plans, and Drift Detection to deploy Ansible code.

3. Ansible Playbook - ansible-playbook

Destroying Ansible Environments

Please note that env zero does not execute any Ansible commands for destroying Ansible environments.

It serves solely to attach custom flows.

Another thing to note - is that when Destroying Ansible Environments, there’s no approval flow, unless you set Approval Policies.

Additional Controls

Setting a custom Playbook file

By default, env zero will run the ansible-playbook commands with playbook.yml or playbook.yaml (whichever is present).

If you want to set a custom playbook file name, you can set the ENV0_ANSIBLE_PLAYBOOK variable with whichever value you desire.

Setting custom flags

To set any ansible-playbook flag, you can set an ANSIBLE_CLI_flagName environment variable.

The flagName is always preceded by a --, like so:

--flagName

If a value is set to the variable, it will be appended to the flag with a space after the flag name, like so:

--flagName value

For example:

1. ANSIBLE_CLI_become would add the --become flag.
2. ANSIBLE_CLI_inventory, and setting its value to hosts would add the --inventory hosts flag.

Setting extra variables

To set any extra variable for ansible-playbook, you can set an ANSIBLE_VAR_varName variable. Any variable you add here will be parsed and added to the --extra-vars flag.

For example, setting a ANSIBLE_VAR_myVar with a value my-value, would add the --extra-vars 'myVar="my-value"' flag.

Multiple variables are supported, so setting ANSIBLE_VAR_firstVar=value-one and ANSIBLE_VAR_secondVar=value-two, would add --extra-vars 'firstVar="value-one" secondVar="value-two"'.

Skipping Ansible Check Step

In some cases, Ansible checks might fail but for a good reason, and in those cases you might want to skip those checks during the deployment.

For this use case, you can set an environment variable named ENV0_SKIP_ANSIBLE_CHECK and set the value to be true - This will cause the deployment to skip that step and mark the step as Skipped and continue to the next steps in the deployment flow.