Running ansible script in Azure DevOps pipeline

Question

I am trying to customize the VM under the hood of an Azure DevOps pipeline based on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial 64).

I can see that I can run bash scripts as tasks, among various ready-made tasks.

By running a bash script I can see in the Ubuntu environment ansible is installed, because when typing sudo apt-get install ansible in the content of the task of type "Bash", then the output of the Logs of the execution of the pipeline says:

2018-10-22T16:33:00.7632392Z ansible is already the newest version (2.0.0.2-2ubuntu1.1).

From the Azure DevOps/pipelines documentation website there is no information regarding ansible, but the command is there indeed, and I can successfully run stuff like apt-get install, so I could even install it in case it was not there.

I am not able to specify the host (localhost) for ansible, not even changing the file /etc/ansible/hosts as sudo because I get back "permission denied".

Is it possible at all to run ansible playbooks in that DevOps/pipeline environment?

My idea was to:

• clone a git repository containing the "code to test with the pipeline" and the ansible playbook to configure the Ubuntu environment
• then changing directory to /home/vsts/work/1/s/ (it seems the Azure DevOps/pipeline user is called vsts and when cloning a git repository then it goes to that ~/1/s/ directory)
• then run an Azure DevOps/pipeline task of type "Bash" containing:
  • an invocation of the ansible playbook (to configure the Ubuntu environment)
  • an invocation of the Makefile in the git repository (to run "the tests")

So far I've always got back "permission denied" when trying variations of:

sudo echo $(ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet addr' | awk '{print $2 }' | sed 's/addr://g') >> /etc/ansible/hosts 
ansible-playbook ci/prepare-vm/azure-pipeline-vm-setup.yml -vvvv --extra-vars "cli_input_username=vsts"

or trying to pass the eth0 IP address directly to the command ansible-playbook via the -i parameter

• Why it seems I can not run an ansible script even if the ansible package is installed?
• How can I run this ansible script in an Azure DevOps pipeline?

Answer 1

You can use an alternative file hosts with the flag -i.

E.g.

ansible-playbook -i $(Build.SourcesDirectory)/hosts