This repo contains the code to go along with my YouTube video Using Ansible with AWS.

I strongly recommend using a virtual environment for all things ansible. There are few things worse than troubleshooting ansible for a few days only to learn that it was some unrelated package causing the problem (when your highschool sweetheart dumps you being on that list). Using a virtual environment ensures you control dependencies plus makes this whole thing portable.

python3 -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate

Install the python dependencies needed, including ansible.

pip install -r requirements.txt

We'll use the ansible inventory role for communicating with AWS.

ansible-galaxy collection install amazon.aws

This requires an inventory file. Modify aws_ec2.yaml to match your environment as needed.

For this to work, you need an AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Access Key. The also must be configured to work with your system. See this for additional info.

Now we can get an inventory of our AWS environment:

ansible-inventory -i aws_ec2.yaml --graph

You can also target specific hosts based on tag names:

aws tag_Role_webserver -i aws_ec2.yaml -m ping

will connect to all EC2 instances with a tag named Role that has a value of webserver

You can now configure EC2 instances using ansible playbooks that you create, or downloaded from Ansible Galaxy.

For additional details, check out the accompanying video on the DevOps for Developers YouTube channel.