Configure WebServer on AWS Cloud using automation tool called ANSIBLE

4 min readSep 8, 2020

Here is my second task given by Vimal Sir in the RedHat Ansible training program … In this task, I’m going to configure webserver on the top of AWS Instance using Ansible tool …

📝 Problem Statement : Deploy Web Server on AWS using ANSIBLE

✅ Provision EC2 instance through ansible.
✅ Retrieve the IP Address of instance using dynamic inventory concept.
✅ Configure the web server through ansible! by copying the webpage to /var/www/html/ directory .

Let’s solve this case step by step …

Step 1: For launching Instance on AWS Cloud from localhost, we have to install library for ansible to contact with AWS EC2 instance… For this install boto library using pip3 command …

pip3 install boto
pip3 install boto3

After installing boto , boto3 use this command to cross check whether libraries are installed or not …

Step 2: Write the code for launching webserver on the top of AWS Cloud … Here is the code ..

- hosts: localhost
  vars_files:
    — credentials.yml
  tasks:
    — name: Launch VM on AWS Cloud
      ec2:
        key_name: "hcc81"
        instance_type: "t2.micro"
        image: "ami-052c08d70def0ac62" 
        wait: yes
        count: 1
        vpc_subnet_id: "subnet-1f3c4953"
        assign_public_ip: yes
        region: "ap-south-1"
        state: present
        group: "default"
        aws_access_key: "{{ awsuser }}"
        aws_secret_key: "{{ awspass }}"
        instance_tags:
          Name: Ansible_aws_wb

Access key and secret key are very confidential for us … So, In ansible we have a concept of vault … Using that concept create another file. Here is the command :

ansible-vault create --vault-id prod@prompt credentials.yml

The credentials file which I have created is fully encrypted by ansible … Check using this cmd :

cat credentials.yml

Step 3: Run the playbook using below command …

ansible-playbook --vault-id prod@prompt task.yml

Check AWS Console whether the instance is launched or not with desirable parameters …

Step 4: Now retrieve the public IP of that instance which I have launched before … For this u have to download two files from this two links … Run the below command to download those two files … These are the scripts given redhat officially … Use can check this from ansible docs …

Make a diff. folder and then enter these URL's to download scripts.wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/stable-2.9/contrib/inventory/ec2.iniwget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/stable-2.9/contrib/inventory/ec2.pyMake both files executable by running this commands ...chmod +x ec2.py
chmod +x ec2.ini

We have to enter the region , aws access key and aws secret key in that files … Doing that one is diificult , So export the below these things in command line as I mentioned below ..

export AWS_REGION='ap-south-1'

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='enter your access key'

export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='enter your secret key'

After exporting run the below command to retrieve the current running Instances IP’s in AWS Cloud …

./ec2.py --list

U can see the IP of current running Instance in AWS Cloud …

U can also cross check with the console of AWS Cloud …
Now create a normal file and enter the IP of EC2 instance which we have retrieved using Dynamic Inventory concept … Here is what I have did ..

I have already copied the key pair to root folder …

Step 5: Now we have to make some changes in ansible configuration file … Here I’m sharing whole code to u …

Check that instance IP is pinging or not using ansible command ..

ansible all -m ping

Step 6: Now write another playbook for configuring webserver on AWS Instance … Here is the code …

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Install httpd package
      package:
        name: "httpd"
        state: present    - name: Copy index.html webpage 
      copy:
        src: "index.html"
        dest: "/var/www/html"    - name: start the httpd service  
      service:
        name: "httpd"
        state: started

Run the playbook using below command …