For today’s post I will walk you through the process of setting up a web-app testing environment automatically using ansible.
I will split this into 2 parts. First part will focus on creating the automation needed to deploy the containers on proxmox. Second part is about creating the tester tool solution.
Assumption:
- you already have a proxmox server in place.
- your ansible controller has passwordless ssh access enabled to the proxmox server.
- you know what ansible is and how to use it.
ok, so the first step is to install ansible. I recommend doing this in a virtual environment:
costin@hp:~$ python -m venv ansible
costin@hp:~$ . ansible/bin/activate
(ansible) costin@hp:~$ pip install ansible
Collecting ansible
Downloading ansible-6.7.0-py3-none-any.whl (42.8 MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 42.8 MB 16.4 MB/s
Collecting ansible-core~=2.13.7
Downloading ansible_core-2.13.13-py3-none-any.whl (2.1 MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 2.1 MB 23.6 MB/s
Collecting resolvelib<0.9.0,>=0.5.3
Downloading resolvelib-0.8.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (16 kB)
Collecting packaging
Downloading packaging-24.0-py3-none-any.whl (53 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 53 kB 3.2 MB/s
Collecting PyYAML>=5.1
Downloading PyYAML-6.0.1-cp38-cp38-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (736 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 736 kB 24.5 MB/s
Collecting jinja2>=3.0.0
Downloading jinja2-3.1.4-py3-none-any.whl (133 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 133 kB 31.6 MB/s
Collecting cryptography
Downloading cryptography-42.0.7-cp37-abi3-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (3.8 MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 3.8 MB 13.3 MB/s
Collecting MarkupSafe>=2.0
Using cached MarkupSafe-2.1.5-cp38-cp38-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (26 kB)
Collecting cffi>=1.12; platform_python_implementation != "PyPy"
Downloading cffi-1.16.0-cp38-cp38-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (444 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 444 kB 33.8 MB/s
Collecting pycparser
Downloading pycparser-2.22-py3-none-any.whl (117 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 117 kB 36.4 MB/s
Installing collected packages: resolvelib, packaging, PyYAML, MarkupSafe, jinja2, pycparser, cffi, cryptography, ansible-core, ansible
Successfully installed MarkupSafe-2.1.5 PyYAML-6.0.1 ansible-6.7.0 ansible-core-2.13.13 cffi-1.16.0 cryptography-42.0.7 jinja2-3.1.4 packaging-24.0 pycparser-2.22 resolvelib-0.8.1
(ansible) costin@hp:~$
Next, I’ve created an ansible inventory for my proxmox server. For this to work, you also need to setup passwordless ssh access based on ssh keys.
(ansible) costin@hp:~/ansible/proxmox$ cat inventory.yml
---
all:
hosts:
pmox:
ansible_host: 192.168.0.100
ansible_user: root
ansible_port: 22
(ansible) costin@hp:~/ansible/proxmox$ ansible -m ping pmox -i inventory.yml
pmox | SUCCESS => {
"ansible_facts": {
"discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
},
"changed": false,
"ping": "pong"
}
Now that we’re able to run Ansible code on the proxmox server, next step is to start deploying containers and VMs over it.
For this we’ll use a collection: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/proxmox_module.html
(ansible) costin@hp:~/ansible/proxmox$ ansible-galaxy collection install community.general
Starting galaxy collection install process
Process install dependency map
Starting collection install process
Downloading https://galaxy.ansible.com/api/v3/plugin/ansible/content/published/collections/artifacts/community-general-9.0.1.tar.gz to /home/costin/.ansible/tmp/ansible-local-41867639bgiz5qc/tmpp5j008n7/community-general-9.0.1-mwhmm563
Installing 'community.general:9.0.1' to '/home/costin/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community/general'
community.general:9.0.1 was installed successfully
(ansible) costin@hp:~/ansible/proxmox$
This collection comes with some requirements on the proxmox server: proxmoxer and requests which were installed manually on proxmox server using pip.
Created a playbook to deploy and start a container on Proxmox host:
(ansible) costin@hp:~/ansible/proxmox$ cat play-container.yml
---
- hosts: pmox
tasks:
- name: Create new container with minimal options
community.general.proxmox:
vmid: 200 #CONTAINER_ID
node: pmox #PROXMOX_SERVER
api_user: root@pam #PROXMOX_ACCOUNT
api_password: <PROXMOX_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD>
api_host: pmox #PROXMOX_HOST
password: CTpassword123 #CONTAINER_PASSWORD
hostname: CT200 #HOSTNAME
ostemplate: 'local:vztmpl/debian-12-standard_12.2-1_amd64.tar.zst' #CONTAINER_TEMPLATE
storage: local-lvm #STORAGE
netif: '{"net0":"name=eth0,ip=dhcp,bridge=vmbr0"}'
state: present
- name: Start newly created container
community.general.proxmox:
vmid: 200
api_user: root@pam #PROXMOX_ACCOUNT
api_password: <PROXMOX_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD>
api_host: pmox #PROXMOX_HOST
state: started
(ansible) costin@hp:~/ansible/proxmox$ ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml play-container.yml
PLAY [pmox] ***************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************************************
ok: [pmox]
TASK [Create new container with minimal options] **************************************************************************
changed: [pmox]
TASK [Start newly created container] **************************************************************************************
changed: [pmox]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************************************
pmox : ok=3 changed=2 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
Then you should be able to see the newly created CT on proxmox server:
root@pmox:~# pct status 200
status: running
we can even connect to it using the above defined CONTAINER_PASSWORD:
root@pmox:~# pct console 200
Connected to tty 1
Type <Ctrl+a q> to exit the console, <Ctrl+a Ctrl+a> to enter Ctrl+a itself
Debian GNU/Linux 12 CT200 tty1
CT200 login: root
Password:
Linux CT200 6.5.13-5-pve #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC PMX 6.5.13-5 (2024-04-05T11:03Z) x86_64
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
root@CT200:~#
In Part 2 we’ll see how to deploy more containers that we’ll be using in our webapp tool tester solution.