Ansible: Control Node Reasonable Setup

This post will focus on coming up with an reasonable Ansible control node setup for a homelab. By reasonable setup I mean a setup that will allow me to properly send tasks to managed nodes with a lower likelyhood of failure. From this point I would like to focus on learning the important parts of ansible instead of juggling left and right to fix basic setup errors.

Create or select a working folder

To keep things simple, I am going to have my inventory in /etc/ansible-admin/ own by the ansible-admin group.

Where to keep ansible.cfg

The default ansible.cfg can be left where it is. For managing our nodes, I am going to keep my own ansible configuration inside /etc/ansible-admin/ansible.cfg

Where to keep the inventories

The lab inventories can be kept in /etc/ansible-admin/inventory/

Disable the host key verification

From ansible.cfg:

[defaults]
host_key_checking = False

or from an environment variable:

export ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING=False

or from the command line:

ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING=False ansible-playbook my_playbook.yml