Homelab Ansible

Ansible playbooks for setting up my RPi homelab with k3s and Tailscale. I borrow liberally from the k3s/k3s-ansible repo for configuring my k3s cluster with ansible. The purpose of creating this repo is to maintain things outside of k3s and to get familiar with writing ansible on my own.

Helpful CLI Flags

• -k: Request the password for the specified used before executing
• -K: requests the "become" password before executing
• -u : Specify the user to use when executing the commands

Prerequisites

Install Ansible

• On macOS:

  brew install ansible
  

• On Ubuntu/Debian:

  apt-get install ansible
  

Install sshpass

To use SSH password authentication with Ansible (the -k flag), you need to install sshpass:

• On macOS:

  brew install sshpass
  

• On Ubuntu/Debian:

  apt-get install sshpass
  

Validating the inventory

The inventory can be validate by running: ansible-inventory -i inventory.yaml --list

Ping Servers

The hosts can be pinged by running: ansible homelab -m ping -k -i inventory.yaml

Run a playbook

ansible-playbook -u root -kK -i inventory.yaml playbooks/nas.yaml

Adding Additional Control Plane Nodes

To add additional K3s control plane nodes:

1. Add the new node to the master_nodes section in the inventory.yaml file

2. Run only the additional server role with one of these approaches:

   Option A: Directly specify the additional node name(s) exactly as they appear in your inventory:

   ansible-playbook -i inventory.yaml playbooks/install.yaml --tags k3s_server -K --limit storm_father
   

   Or to target multiple additional nodes:

   ansible-playbook -i inventory.yaml playbooks/install.yaml --tags k3s_server -K --limit 'storm_father,the_tower'
   

   Option B: Exclude the first node explicitly:

   ansible-playbook -i inventory.yaml playbooks/install.yaml --tags k3s_server -K --limit 'master_nodes:!bondsmith'
   

   Option C: Create a separate group in your inventory.yaml file for additional master nodes:

   # Add this to inventory.yaml
   additional_masters:
     hosts:
       storm_father:
       the_tower:

   Then target that group:

   ansible-playbook -i inventory.yaml playbooks/install.yaml --tags k3s_server -K --limit additional_masters
   

These commands will apply the k3s_additional_server role to your additional control plane nodes.