Ansible Role: Tools

This role allows you to initialize a server with the various prerequisites required:

• installation of additional packages
• SSH configuration change
• changing the MOTD template
• hostname change
• change the prompt for the root user depending on the environment (dev, staging, production)

Role Variables

Available variables are listed below, along with default values (see defaults/main.yml):

You can give a name to your server using the remote_hostname variable. By default, it is set to "HOST000".

remote_hostname: "WEBSERVER001"

The timezone of your server can also be set with the timezone variable. By default, it is set to Paris time.

timezone: "Europe/Paris"

A personalized ascii art can be filled in with motd_ascii_art variable. This will be displayed in the MOTD when connecting to the server. Be careful to respect the line breaks.

A contact email address can be filled in to be also displayed in the MOTD.

By default, the MOTD template will be set to display several useful information such as:

• FQDN
• distribution version and name
• kernel
• whether the server is virtual or not
• the private and public IPs
• CPUs
• RAM
• swap
• python interpreter version

Additional information can be added using the variable motd_info.

Changing the color of the hostname in the prompt depending on the server environment may be possible. By default, in production, it will be displayed in red. If the server is flagged as staging, it will be displayed in yellow and green for development instances. The color of each server can be changed using the default_prompt_color variable where a foreground color code can be indicated. See more.

default_prompt_color: 34
# Foreground color will be set to blue.

Note: In its current state, this only works for the root user.

Example Playbook

- hosts: servers
  roles:
     - { role: julien_langlois.tools, remote_hostname: "WEBSERVER001", default_prompt_color: 34 }

License

MIT / BSD

Author Information

This role was created in 2020 by Julien Langlois.