Update 12/17/2021 – AWX has changed a bit on the install and the old playbook has been updated. Please see notes at the end for white screen issue.
Having worked a fair amount in my day job with Ansible and Ansible Tower, I was delighted to find out that there was a free version of Ansible Tower called Ansible AWX. Unfortunately, I discovered that documentation on using the product was either severely lacking, or incompatible with current version. Luckily I was able to find a post from Computer For Geeks that was able to get me ninety percent of the way there.
There are a couple of prerequisites in order to run this installer.
- You must have VM or Physical CentOS 8/Rocky Linux Machine running
- You must have sudo or root privileges on the machine.
The Computer For Geeks post is great, but there are a couple steps missed.
- Kubernetes requires swap to be off
- Kubernetes recommends that the Firewall be turned off or ports to be allowed in the firewall. For this tutorial, we are going with the firewall off.
- Resources must be above 1CPU and 1GB Memory. For my case I have 4CPUs and 8GB of memory. You may be able to go lower but I have not tested.
Once you have the VM provisioned you can execute the following playbook from my GitHub
After the playbook has executed you’ll still need to do a couple of things, and they are all detailed from Step 4 in the the Computer For Geeks Post.
Some more gotchas. I mistakenly left my CentOS VM at the defaults (1VCPU and 1GB Memory), and was stuck with the awx-operator pod at pending.
I was unsure as to why this was the case even after multiple reboots. I decided to try to troubleshoot the kubernetes instance, which I’m not very familiar with yet. Looking at the documentation I ran the below command.
The output at the end gave me the reason.
Shutting down the VM, add resources and restarting I saw this, which was progress.
Once the pod showed Running, I was able to get the port of the Ansible AWX instance and go to my browser. You will see this while the instance comes up.
After a couple minutes you will be granted by a login screen, and can follow the Computers of Geeks Post.
If you get a blank white screen do the following
kubectl -n awx exec -it awx-XXX-XXX -c awx-web — bash
The awx-XXX-XXX can be obtained by running kubectl get pods -n awx
You’ll see output like below
[root@awx ~]# kubectl get pods -n awx
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
awx-postgres-0 1/1 Running 1 103m
awx-6846fd65b5-tq2b9 4/4 Running 4 102m
awx-operator-controller-manager-647f4c5c7d-2xspm 2/2 Running 2 106m
Once inside the awx-web container run the following
ln -s /var/lib/awx/venv/awx/lib/python3.8/site-packages/awx/ui/build/static /var/lib/awx/public/static
Refresh your web browser of choice and you’ll get the login screen once again.
I actually deployed tower2 from my first instance of AWX after working out the steps by hand. I’ll be working on a series of post detailing how I setup my instance of AWX and what I utilize it for.
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