Move to manage systems using Ansible?

[iandol]

Ansible is a very well established management system to automate hundreds of nodes:

https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/latest/getting_started/index.html

It requires a control node and one-to-many managed nodes. ansible is only needed to be installed on the control node, and ssh + python the only managed node requirement.

@Ccccraz -- what do you think?

[Ccccraz]

WOW, this looks very suitable. It's definitely worth trying!

I actually want to build a similar system into the future cogmoteHub / cagelabHub

I will create a next_generation_cagelab milestone and add it to it.

[iandol]

I’ve implemented a first pass in https://github.com/cagelab/Setup/tree/main/ansible

Ansible is really simple: there is an inventory of the managed nodes placed in /etc/ansible/hosts and playbook files that contain the tasks to run. My first pass uses an update.yaml playbook to ensure apt tools are present, ensures symlinks to the various config files, resets all the gitee repos to ensure a consistent codebase, ensures cogmoteGO and mediamtx and OBS are the latest versions. I’m using the built in modules that do the low level bits, and the good news is as this is well known AI tool can easily write it for you, I tried copilot and google antigravity and both easily tweak and fix the playbook tasks…

[iandol]

A lot of what bootstrap.sh and makelinks.sh do could be replaced with ansible playbooks. Also currently we use zsh scripts to stop and start the CageLab services but this could also be refactored into ansible playbooks:

https://github.com/CogPlatform/CageLab/tree/main/software/scripts

Ansible does have Windows support but this is not a priority for me at least…

[iandol]

I realised we can use the awesome status API in cogmoteGO to check that no task is running before we run any sort of update

https://github.com/cagelab/Setup/blob/main/ansible/playbooks/update.yaml#L21

Ansible is really awesome, can't believe I didn't use it sooner. There are other automation tools but I think ansible is the perfect mix of simplicity and power...

[Ccccraz]

That sounds great.

Sorry Ian, I haven't had time to follow up on our project recently. I'm swamped with endless trivial matters.

[Ccccraz]

I realised we can use the awesome status API in cogmoteGO to check that no task is running before we run any sort of update

https://github.com/cagelab/Setup/blob/main/ansible/playbooks/update.yaml#L21

Ansible is really awesome, can't believe I didn't use it sooner. There are other automation tools but I think ansible is the perfect mix of simplicity and power...

That sounds like a good idea. I will finish this API this week.

[iandol]

Hi, this is what I developed so far:

https://github.com/cagelab/Setup/blob/main/ansible/playbooks/check_api_status.yaml

This combines /api/status first and then /api/broadcast/data/default/latest to get details of the running task. I think cogmoteGO already works well for this, possibly single API call which would return general status and the last data broadcast in one call would slightly simplify the playbook, but I think its not necessary and is a "messy" API endpoint?

I use it like this:

ansible-playbook --ask-become-pass --limit cagelab ~/.ansible/playbooks/check_api_status.yaml 

…the inventory file is this one symlinked to /etc/ansible/hosts:

https://github.com/cagelab/Setup/blob/main/ansible/inventory/hosts

This returns whic cagelabs are contactable, which are running tasks, and if running a task with some data broadcast the last broadcast.