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Ansible Playbooks

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Full English translation coming soon.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that enables configuration management, deployment, and infrastructure orchestration. In a homelab context, Ansible has become essential for maintaining reproducible and documented infrastructure.

What is Ansible?​

Ansible is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that allows you to:

  • Automate repetitive system administration tasks
  • Standardize configurations across multiple machines
  • Document infrastructure in executable format (code is documentation)
  • Reproduce identical environments easily
  • Version infrastructure with Git

Project structure​

My Ansible infrastructure is available:

Ansible roles​

The infrastructure uses several roles:

  • common: Base system configuration, dnsmasq, firewalld, MergerFS
  • cockpit: Web admin interface
  • docker: Docker Engine installation and configuration
  • services: Docker stack deployment

Secrets management​

Secrets are encrypted with Ansible Vault and injected via Jinja2 templates into .env files.

Benefits of this approach​

  1. Reproducibility: Infrastructure can be recreated identically in minutes
  2. Living documentation: Ansible code documents the infrastructure precisely
  3. Complete automation: No need to SSH for deployment or updates
  4. Security: Secrets are encrypted and never committed in plain text

Current Limitations​

Despite its many advantages, this approach has limitations:

  1. Late versioning: The Git repository Infra_ansible_dockercompose was created after the fact to present the work. In the initial practice, Git, automated tests, and CI/CD were not used due to lack of knowledge at the time.
  2. No automated tests: No automatic playbook validation (Molecule, integration tests)
  3. Single-machine infrastructure: Ansible is designed to manage multiple servers, but I only manage one
  4. No CI/CD integration: Deployments are manual, no automated pipeline

These limitations will be addressed in the Future Homelab with the adoption of Kubernetes and GitOps.

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Detailed English translation of this page is in progress.