After Reading This Article, You will be able to configure the Webserver on the top of Docker using Ansible.

So without any further delay, Let’s get started.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is open-source software that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment.Ansible is included as part of the Fedora distribution of Linux, owned by Red Hat, and is also available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Debian, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux via Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), as well as for other operating systems. Ansible is procedural rather than declarative. In ansible, we define what we want to do and ansible go through each and every step for that.Ansible uses SSH to connect to remote hosts and do the setup, no software needed to be installed beforehand on a remote host. It’s simple, powerful and flexible.

Let’s have a look at some of the terminology used in Ansible:

Controller Node: Machine where Ansible is installed.
Managed Node: Managed nodes are also sometimes called hosts.
Inventory: Information regarding servers to be managed
Playbook: Automation is defined using tasks defined in YAML format
Task: Procedure to be executed
Module: Predefined commands executed directly on remote hosts.

What is Docker?

Docker is a software platform that allows you to build, test, and deploy applications quickly. Docker packages software into standardized units called containers that have everything the software needs to run including libraries, system tools, code, and runtime. Using Docker, you can quickly deploy and scale applications into any environment and know your code will run.

This article contains 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.

The system that you want to make Control Node install Ansible in it using command pip3 install ansible, then install openssh using command yum install openssh.
Now after installing ansible, just check using ansible — version command.

Now It is clear that Ansible is installed perfectly.

After installing Ansible create an Inventory anywhere in the system, here I have created an inventory named ip.txt

Now we have to provide details of managed node in this file created. Here I am Using RHEL8 Os as my Managed Node.

Here, 192.168.0.113 is IP of Managed Node
ansible_ssh_user : User you want to login in managed node
ansible_ssh_pass: provide the password of the above user
Now check the connectivity with Managed Node using the command ansible all -m ping

If it shows a message in green color that means there is connectivity and you will see the message ping pong.
For running ansible command, we need inventory file which is expected to be at a specified path: “/etc/ansible/hosts”. We can change its path using ansible config file (ansible.cfg file) in ansible workspace and define inventory file path there

Now create yml file, here i have created file name docker.yml. This yml file is playbook where we write code in YAML.
The code in playbook is as below:

Now run the playbook using the command ansible-playbook docker.yml

Here, If we see green color then it means that much code is skipped, if we orange then some changes are made and if we don’t see any red color in output then it means The playbook is executed successfully.
Now we can verify that docker is installed in Managed Node.

Also Docker repo created in /etc/yum.repos.d

We can also see that container is launched.

Now check IP of the container.

Docker service also started

Now finally So the webpage is working well and showing the content properly whatever I write in the index.html file.