Personal Ansible Roles

This repository contains a collection of reusable roles that I use to bootstrap monitoring, observability, and supporting services in my lab environments. The content has been refreshed to follow the Ansible 2.10+ best practices, including modern task syntax, the new group_vars layout, and explicit use of the ansible.builtin collection.

Repository Layout

ansible_roles/
├── group_vars/          # Group specific variable files (e.g. staging/)
├── hosts                # Example inventory file
├── roles/               # Individual roles for services such as Prometheus, Nginx, etc.
├── target.yml           # Example playbook that wires the roles together
└── Readme.md            # This document

Each role follows the standard Ansible role structure (defaults, tasks, templates, and so on). The target.yml playbook now declares the ansible.builtin collection and uses modern task syntax so it is ready to run with Ansible 2.10 or newer.

Getting Started

1. Install dependencies

   • Python 3.9+
   • Ansible 2.10 or newer (pip install ansible)

2. Inventory

   • Update the hosts file with your infrastructure details.
   • Place per-environment variables in group_vars/<group>/.

3. Select roles

   • Enable the roles you want in target.yml by uncommenting them under the roles section.

4. Run the playbook

   ansible-playbook -i hosts target.yml

Recommended Workflow

Step	Command	Purpose
1	ansible-playbook --syntax-check target.yml	Validate the playbook parses correctly.
2	ansible-playbook --check -i hosts target.yml	Perform a dry run without applying changes.
3	ansible-playbook -i hosts target.yml	Apply the roles to the selected hosts.

Available Roles

The repository currently includes roles for:

• Prometheus Stack: Prometheus, Alertmanager, Pushgateway, Thanos (query & sidecar), and Elasticsearch exporters (VM and Docker).
• Proxy / Load Balancing: Nginx with monitoring extensions.
• High Availability: Keepalived.
• Service Discovery: Consul (stand-alone or clustered).
• Elastic Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana.
• Miscellaneous: MySQL, Docker, VSFTPD, and more.

Refer to each role's README.md (where provided) for configuration specifics.

Contributing Improvements

• Use ansible-lint or yamllint when modifying roles to maintain consistency.
• Ensure new tasks use loop/include_tasks and Fully Qualified Collection Names (FQCNs) where appropriate.
• Document any new variables or dependencies in the relevant role README.

Supported Platforms

• ✅ Ubuntu (primary test target)
• ⚠️ CentOS / Debian (not fully validated yet, contributions welcome!)

Feel free to open issues or pull requests with suggestions, fixes, or additional roles.