Unarchive different remote files in different target servers

This solution is explained in detail in the Codeyourinfra project blog post How to unarchive different files in different servers in just one shot. Check it out!

Problem

You have a bunch of servers and quite often you have to manually extract in each one a specific compressed file. It works well when there's not too many servers to change, but such task becomes really boring and even error-prone when it reaches, say, a hundred servers or more. How can it be done in scale?

Solution

unarchive_from_url_param is an example of Ansible role which makes it possible. You just need to pass the parameters appropriately. For each server, the role expects a url from where the compressed file is downloaded and a target directory to where the content is extracted. All the hosts that are defined inside the servers group in the Ansible inventory are considered on a single execution.

---
- hosts: servers
  roles:
    - role: unarchive_from_url_param
      vars:
        params:
          server1:
            url: https://archive.apache.org/dist/maven/maven-3/3.5.0/binaries/apache-maven-3.5.0-bin.tar.gz
            target: /opt/maven
          server2:
            url: https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.10.1-bin.zip
            target: /opt/ant

Test

First of all, turn on the VMs, executing the command $ vagrant up. Once the test environment is up, execute the command $ ansible-playbook playbook.yml. Finally, in order to check if the compressed files were properly extracted in both servers, execute the command $ ansible servers -m shell -a "ls /opt".

Automated tests

You can also test the solution automaticaly, by executing ./test.sh or using Molecule. If you prefer the latter, use venv to setup the test environment:

python3 -m venv env && source env/bin/activate && pip install -r requirements.txt

After that, you can choose to perform the test through 3 different ways:

1. Using local VMs (the default)

molecule test

As well as the shell script test.sh, it requires:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant

2. Using EC2 instances

molecule test -s aws

If your choice is performing the test in AWS, bear in mind you must have your credentials appropriately in ~/.aws/credentials. You can configure it through the AWS CLI tool.

The test is performed in the AWS region Europe - London (eu-west-2). Just run the test and check the running instances through your AWS Console.

3. Using Docker containers

molecule test -s docker

That's the way through the role is tested in Travis CI.

It requires Docker.