Ansible is a configuration management and orchestration application that was recently acquired by Red Hat. Rancher is a platform for working with Docker containers.

In the following blog post, originally published on the official Rancher blog, you’ll read how to use Ansible and Docker to deploy a WordPress service on Rancher.

The article begins:

Over the last year I’ve been using Rancher with Ansible, and have found that using the two together can be incredibly useful. If you aren’t familiar with Ansible, it is a powerful configuration management tool which can be used to manage servers remotely without a daemon or agent running on the host. Instead, it uses SSH to connect with hosts, and applies tasks directly on the machines. Because of this, as long as you have SSH access to the host, (and Python) running on the host, you will be able to use Ansible to manage hosts remotely.

In this post, I will be using Ansible with Docker to automate the build out of a simple wordpress environment on a Rancher deployment. Specifically, I will include the following steps:

  • Installing Docker on my hosts using Ansible.
  • Setting up a fresh Rancher installation using Ansible.
  • Registering hosts with Rancher using Ansible.
  • Deploying the Application containers on the Hosts.

Preparing the Playbook

Read the complete article here.

configuration management