Getting Started with Ansible Galaxy

Reviewed on 05 March 2024 • Published on 02 August 2018

ansible
getting-started
ansible-galaxy
ansible-collections
ansible-galaxy-module

In this tutorial, we show you how to use Ansible Galaxy. Ansible Galaxy is a tool that seeks to give visibility to one of Ansible’s most exciting features: reusable roles for server configuration or the installation of applications. Many users share roles on Ansible Galaxy.

Ansible roles consist of playbooks that group multiple tasks into one container. They allow the performance of automation tasks with clean directory structures.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
An Instance running Ubuntu Linux
Basic knowledge of Ansible and Ansible-Apache
Ansible-Apache installed on your local computer

Creating a LAMP server with Ansible roles

To use roles in Ansible playbooks, you must first download them.

Install Apache, MySQL and PHP.
```
ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.apache geerlingguy.mysql geerlingguy.php
```
Note
In this example we use geerlinguy’s role, which is a software developer involved in many open source development communities. The latest version will be dowloaded if you do not specify which one you want to download. Add the version after the role name to specify a version. Example: geerlingguy.apache,1.0.0 or geerlingguy.mysql,1.0.0. If you want to use other roles, check out geerlinguy’s Ansible profile.

Create an Ansible playbook named lamp.yml with the following contents:

---
  - hosts: all
    roles:
      - geerlingguy.mysql
      - geerlingguy.apache
      - geerlingguy.php

Run the playbook against a host

ansible-playbook lamp.yml

The LAMP server is now created.

Creating a Solr server with Ansible roles

Apache Solr is a fast open-source Java search server. Solr enables you to easily create search engines that search websites, databases and files.

Note

For more information on Solr, refer to the Solr official documentation.

Install Java, tomcat6, Solr with an ansible-galaxy command. We will use the role from geerlinguy who is a software developer involved in many open source development communities. Check geerlinguy for many other roles.
```
ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.java geerlingguy.tomcat6 geerlingguy.solr
```

Create a playbook named solr.yml with the following contents:

  ---
  - hosts: all
    roles:
      - geerlingguy.java
      - geerlingguy.tomcat6
      - geerlingguy.solr

Run the playbook against a host

ansible-playbook solr.yml

The Solr server is now created.

Helpful Galaxy commands

Some other helpful ansible-galaxy commands are:

ansible-galaxy list displays a list of installed roles, with version numbers
ansible-galaxy remove [role] removes an installed role
ansible-galaxy init can be used to create a role template suitable for submission to Ansible Galaxy

Additionally, you can configure the default path where Ansible roles are downloaded by editing your ansible.cfg configuration file (normally located in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg) and setting a roles_path in the [defaults] section.

For more information on Galaxy commands, refer to the official documentation.