Configuring Ansible Tower with the Tower Configuration Collection

One of the goals of Red Hat Services is to bring a standardized and collaboratively created toolkit and approach to customers to speed up and improve automation practices. Red Hat’s Automation Community of Practice--a part of Red Hat Services--has created a new collection that acts as a wrapper for the ansible.tower collection, creating a powerful toolkit to help speed up the automation of an Ansible Tower environment. This post will provide an overview of what’s in the collection and show you how to install and use the tower_configuration. 

Why a wrapper collection was needed

With the most recent releases of Ansible and its transition to using collections last year, a whole wave of community collections have been developed to expand the Ansible ecosystem. One such collection is the “ansible.tower” (based on the upstream “awx.awx”) collection, which creates replacements for the outdated Ansible Tower web modules. 

The common use case of automating the configuration of Ansible Tower had previously led to us creating a vast array of similar solutions to enable the transition from configuration as code into actual Ansible Tower objects. The convergence of a single, standardised solution has led to the creation of the “tower_configuration” collection, which provides a set of easy-to-use roles for the single purpose for configuring Ansible Tower objects. 

Although the Ansible Tower collection provides a comprehensive set of plugins and modules, there is no overall build configuration approach using roles and playbooks. At present, there is also a lack of a standardized model to drive such automation. Let’s see how Red Hat Services is helping with a standardized model.

What is inside the collection?

The collection contains wrapper roles for each of the Ansible Tower collection modules and in turn, many of the API endpoints for Ansible Tower. We have also put together a standardized data model to be able to use predictable variables to define Tower objects (such as tower_projects, tower_credentials, tower_inventories, etc.) along with detailed example playbooks which provide a demo configuration for Ansible Tower. Finally, the collection makes heavy use of CI practices using code reviews, automated linting (ansible-lint and yaml-lint), and automated integration tests upon new contributions and releases.

Getting started

First things first, we need to install the collection before we can make use of it. To do that, use the following command.

 $ ansible-galaxy collection install redhat_cop.tower_configuration

 $ ansible-galaxy collection install ansible.tower

$ vim tower_config.yml
---
- name: Playbook to configure ansible tower organizations
  hosts: localhost
  collections:
    - redhat_cop.tower_configuration
    - ansible.tower
  vars:
    tower_hostname: https://tower.example.com
    tower_username: admin
    tower_password: password
    tower_organizations:
      - name: Satellite
      - name: Default
    tower_projects:
      - name: Demo project
        organization: Default
        scm_branch: master
        scm_type: git
        scm_update_on_launch: true
        scm_url: https://github.com/ansible/tower-example.git
  roles:
    - organization
    - projects

$ ansible-playbook tower_config.yml