Ansible AWX on K3s

Ansible AWX on K3S

Ansible AWX provides a web interface and REST API for Ansible.
Ansible AWX Git Repo
It provides us with a task engine which makes configuring and setting up repeated tasks like updates a breeze.

Requirements

• K3s cluster or stand alone node
• Kubectl installed on your machine and configured to connect to your node / cluster

Setup tools to build components

You will need to install JQ and git and also make onto your system.

sudo apt install jq git make

Now you can clone the AWX - operator repo to your local machine

git clone https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator.git

Create a namespace for AWX

export NAMESPACE=awx
kubectl create ns ${NAMESPACE}

Now change into the directory of repo you cloned erlier

cd awx-operator/

Fetch the latest release tag for the AWX

RELEASE_TAG=`curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/ansible/awx-operator/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4`
echo $RELEASE_TAG

Now we can deploy the operator into the namespace we made erlier

export NAMESPACE=awx
make deploy

Wait a few moments and the operator should be deployed into the namespace

kubectl get pods -o wide -n awx

Create a persistant volume claim

We now need to create a PVC for the persistant data Ansible is going to use.
If we are using a single node we can create it using this PVC yaml file

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: ansible-pvc
  namespace: awx
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  storageClassName: local-path
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 8Gi

This will create a persistant volume on the local node of 8GB for the pod.
If you are using a cluster you will want to taint your nodes and ensure you add the right selectors to your PVC YAML file. this is so that IF the pods needs to be re-scheduled it will be on the correct node.

Now we can apply the PVC with:

kubectl apply -f public-static-pvc.yaml -n awx

You should now see the PVC is pending with:

kubectl get pvc -n awx

In an editor, create a new file called “Awx-Instance-deploy.yaml”

---
apiVersion: awx.ansible.com/v1beta1
kind: AWX
metadata:
  name: awx
  namespace: awx
spec:
  service_type: nodeport
  projects_persistence: true
  projects_storage_access_mode: ReadWriteOnce
  web_extra_volume_mounts: |
    - name: static-data
      mountPath: /var/lib/projects
  extra_volumes: |
    - name: static-data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: ansible-pvc

For now, we are going to deploy the pod as a node port. We can always change this and put it behind an ingress in the future and apply TLS.

You can now apply the file

kubectl apply -f Awx-Instance-deploy.yaml -n awx

This will deploy the AWX pod into the AWX namespace.
To check what is happening you can issue a watch command.

watch kubectl get pods -l "app.kubernetes.io/managed-by=awx-operator" -n awx

You should also see some more PVC’s have been created

kubectl  get pvc

If you need to check the logs:

kubectl logs -f deployments/awx-operator-controller-manager -c awx-manager

All of the pods should be spun up. To check:

kubectl get pods -o wide -n awx

If you ever need to check the logs of the pods:

kubectl -n awx  logs deploy/awx -c awx-task
kubectl -n awx  logs deploy/awx -c redis
kubectl -n awx  logs deploy/awx -c awx-web
kubectl -n awx  logs deploy/awx -c awx-ee

Accessing the web interface

To grab the port of the web interface

kubectl get service -n awx

This should show that port is 30080 that is the default for AWX within kubernetes.
You can always change it within the deploy yaml file you created erlier.