About

This repository contains a standard configuration of Ansible playbooks, roles, and other content that can be used for the following

• Deploy a small, static website created with hugo (https://gohugo.io/), by publishing the static assets to an S3 web-enabled bucket.
• Configure the website with CloudFront and https.
• Configure an AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) certificate verified with Route53.

Quickstart

Deploy the static site "Release the Kittens" using Ansible

Step 1

Ensure that you have the following, valid, AWS credentials

• Access key id
• Secret access key

You should put the values of these items in the respective variables in the inventory/group_vars/aws/vars.yaml file,

• aws_access_key
• aws_secret_key

Alternatively, you can create an Ansible Vault file to store these values as well.

Step 2

Ensure that Ansible is installed. This repo was tested with the latest version of Ansible available at the time; version 2.8.

$> pip install ansible

Step 3

Run playbook that bootstraps your Ansible controller. This will ensure that the libraries necessary to create the cloud infrastructure and deploy content to it are installed on your system.

$> ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbooks/bootstrap-controller.yaml -vvvv

Note that the extra -vvvv argument is optional, but will greatly assist in debugging any problems that may arise.

Step 4

Run playbook that bootstraps your AWS Cloud infrastructure.

This will ensure that the necessary AWS cloud infrastructure is in place to deploy the website content to.

$> ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbooks/bootstrap-infra.yaml -vvvv

Step 5

Run playbook to publish your website content.

If you have pre-configured your CI/CD system to auto-publish the website content to your S3 bucket, the consider this step optional.

Regardless, it is helpful to have this playbook in situations where you might have a dev/test bucket that you want to view the content in before it goes to prod.

$> ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbooks/deploy-site-content.yaml

Step 6 (optional)

Run playbook to configure AWS ACM certificates on the CloudFront distribution, and validate them agains the Route53 domain releasethekittens.net.

Note that for this playbook to work, the aforementioned domain must have been purchased via Route53, and the associated Hosted domain must pre-exist. If you are using Tim's temporary account then both of these cases should already be met.

$> ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbooks/bonus.yaml

Playbooks

Playbooks available in this role can be found in the playbooks/ directory. Each playbook includes a preamble that explains the purpose of the playbook,, required/optional variables, and examples of using the playbooks.

The playbooks are summarized below.

• playbooks/bootstrap-controller.yaml - Used to setup the Ansible controller
• playbooks/bootstrap-infra.yaml - Used to create the AWS cloud infrastructure
• playbooks/deploy-site-content.yaml - Used to upload site content to an S3 bucket
• playbooks/bonus.yaml - Used to configure AWS ACM certificates on the CloudFront distribution and validate them against the Route53 domain releasethekittens.net

Usage with a virtualenv

If you are using a virtualenv to deploy the infrastructure and content, you will want to change the ansible_python_interpreter value in the inventory/group_vars/all.yaml file.

By default, this is commented out.