Part 4 - Deploying Files with Ansible – Copying Apache’s index.html -

Sometimes you just want to push a file to a remote machine and overwrite something that already exists so here we are configuring a simple webserver and in that attempt trying to push the config file from our ansible server to the remote host.

Before automating the install, I removed any existing Apache installation:

ansible ubuntu -b -m apt -a "name=apache2 state=absent purge=yes"

ansible ubuntu -b -m apt -a "autoremove=yes"

If it returns “command not found”, the machine is clean.

ansible ubuntu -m shell -a "apache2 -v"

Create a directory under our /etc/ansible

sudo mkdir webfiles

Create a custom HTML file under /etc/ansible/webfiles/default-site.html

<html>
    <title> this is a cool website </title>
    <body><p>Ansible and vcf automation in motion </p></body>
</html>

Create the playbook to install Apache and copy the file Example Playbook (webserver-rebuild.yml)

---
- hosts: ubuntu
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Install Apache2 fresh
      apt:
        name: apache2
        state: present
        update_cache: yes

    - name: Copy custom index.html to webserver
      copy:
        src: /etc/ansible/webfiles/default-site.html
        dest: /var/www/html/index.html
        owner: root
        group: root
        mode: 0644

Run the playbook

ansible-playbook webserver-rebuild.yml

Check if files are present

ansible ubuntu -m shell -a "cat /var/www/html/index.html"

Test the webpage

I wrote a small playbook that installs Apache and copies that file to the Ubuntu webserver. Ansible overwrote /var/www/html/index.html with my file. My webpage is now live.

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Part 4 – Deploying Files with Ansible – Copying Apache’s index.html

By Ash Thomas

Chinchu A Thomas