Automate dockerization of webserver using Ansible

3 min readMar 17, 2021

What is Docker?

Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels

So, What are we going to deploy here?

We are going to write a playbook that’s gonna perform the following tasks:-

🔅 Configure Docker
🔅 Start and enable Docker services
🔅 Pull the httpd server image from the Docker Hub
🔅 Run the httpd container and expose it to the public
🔅 Copy the html code in /var/www/html directory and start the web server

Firstly check if ansible is installed or not

ansible --version

Next create a ansible.cfg file with the following content:

[defaults]
inventory=inventory
host_key_checking=False
command_warnings=False

Create the inventory containing the IP of the managed node in the same directory as of ansible.cfg file.

<IP of managed node> ansible_ssh_user=root ansible_ssh_pass=password

Once Ansible is successfully configured, we can go on with creating the ansible playbook: —

---
- name: Setup docker on managed node
  hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Configure docker repo
    yum_repository:
     name: docker
     description: Yum repo for docker
     baseurl: https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/7/x86_64/stable/
     gpgcheck: no  - name: Install docker
    command: yum install docker-ce --nobest -y  - name: Install python3
    package:
      name: python3
      state: present  - name: Install docker SDK
    pip:
      name: docker-py  - name: Start and enable docker service
    service:
      name: docker
      state: started
      enabled: yes  - name: Pull docker image
    docker_image:
      name: httpd
      source: pull  - name: Create workspace directory
    file:
      path: /root/Task10/web
      state: directory  - name: Copy webpage content
    copy:
      content: "<h1>This webpage is configured inside a docker container deployed using Ansible.</h1>"
      dest: /root/Task10/web/index.html  - name: Allow port through firewall
    firewalld:
      port: 8081/tcp
      permanent: yes
      immediate: yes
      state: enabled  - name: Run a docker container
    docker_container:
      name: webos
      image: httpd
      state: present
      exposed_ports:
      - 80/tcp
      - 80/udp
      published_ports:
      - 0.0.0.0:8081:80/tcp 
      - 0.0.0.0:8081:80/udp
      volumes:
      - /root/Task10/web/:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/