Manage custom user roles with NGINX Controller. The user role is how permissions are assigned to users. The user role defines the objects / endpoints within NGINX Controller that the user can interact with and what they can do with those objects. NGINX Controller includes three built-in Roles that cannot be modified: admin, user, and guest.

NGINX Controller

controller.fqdn - FQDN of the NGINX Controller instance

controller.auth_token - Authentication token for NGINX Controller

nginx_controller_user_role.metadata.name - name of the Role

This role has multiple template related variables. The descriptions and defaults for all these variables can be found in vars/main.yml

To use this role you can create a playbook such as the following (let's name it nginx_controller_user_role.yaml for the purposes of this example).

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: no

  vars:
    nginx_controller_user_email: "[email protected]" # Required by nginx_controller_generate_token role
    nginx_controller_user_password: "mySecurePassword" # Required by nginx_controller_generate_token role
    nginx_controller_fqdn: "controller.mydomain.com"
    nginx_controller_validate_certs: false

  tasks:
    - name: Retrieve the NGINX Controller auth token
      include_role:
        name: nginxinc.nginx_controller_generate_token

    - name: Configure the user role
      include_role:
        name: nginxinc.nginx_controller_user_role
      vars:
        nginx_controller_user:
          metadata:
            name:  # the name of the user role
            displayName:   # a friendly display name for the user role (spaces and special characters allowed)
            description:  # a description of the user role
            tags:   # an array of tags
            - tagOne
            - tagTwo
          desiredState:
            permissions:  # an array of endpoints, objects, and the level of access
            -
              access: "READ"
              path: "/services/environments/development"
            -
              access: "WRITE"
              path: "/services/environments/test"

You can then run ansible-playbook nginx_controller_user_role.yaml to execute the playbook.

Alternatively, you can also pass/override any variables at run time using the --extra-vars or -e flag like so ansible-playbook nginx_controller_user_role.yaml -e "[email protected] nginx_controller_user_password=notsecure nginx_controller_fqdn=controller.example.local nginx_controller_validate_certs=false"

You can also pass/override any variables by passing a yaml file containing any number of variables like so ansible-playbook nginx_controller_user_role.yaml -e "@nginx_controller_user_role_vars.yaml"

Apache License, Version 2.0

Brian Ehlert

© NGINX, Inc. 2020