Harder to run one of these than I thought. Mostly it takes a lot of
bandwidth, and it's probably better to spend the $5/month you'd sp-
end on the VPS by donating $50 to the torservers.net project.
Avoids the following error in apt:
Skipping acquire of configured file 'nginx/binary-i386/Packages' as repository 'https://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu bionic InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'i386'
There are several ways to install external roles, ie via ansible-galaxy,
git submodules, etc. I found that adding this role to a requirements.yml
file and adding instructions to the README.md is probably the best way.
Using ansible-galaxy actually had issues because the ansible-relayor git
repository has version tags that use mixed styles, like v0.3.3 and 0.1.0
without a v.
No need to give Google even more data or free advertising by using
this as the default! In practice I always use the DNS servers from
the VPS provider anyways.
Instead of looping over a list of items to install, we can actually
just give a list directly to the apt module. This allows the module
to install all packages in one transaction, which is faster as well
as slightly safer for some dependency resolution scenarios.
This tag is no longer reachable after switching to the new dynamic
includes in Ansible 2.4 and 2.5. Anyways, I've been questioning my
decision to add the "packages" tag to any task that uses the apt
module.
Instead of looping over a list of items to install, we can actually
just give a list directly to the apt module. This allows the module
to install all packages in one transaction, which is faster as well
as slightly safer for some dependency resolution scenarios.
Because of the shift from static imports to dynamic includes these
tags will never be reached unless they have their own task that is
tagged at the top-level (dynamic includes don't pass their tags to
their children).
After reörganizing for dynamic includes these tags will never be reached
because the children of dynamic includes do not inherit tags from their
parents as they did with static imports.
As of Ansible 2.4 and 2.5 the behavior for importing tasks has changed
to introduce the notion of static imports and dynamic includes. If the
tasks doing the import is using variable interpolation or conditionals
then the task should be dynamic. This results in quicker playbook runs
due to less importing of unneccessary tasks.
One side effect of this is that child tasks of dynamic includes do not
inherit their parents' tags so you must tag them explicitly or a block.
Also, I had to move the letsencrypt tasks to the main task file so the
tags were available (due to dynamic tasks not inheriting tags).
As of Ansible 2.4 and 2.5 the behavior for importing tasks has changed
to introduce the notion of static imports and dynamic includes. If the
tasks doing the import is using variable interpolation or conditionals
then the task should be dynamic. This results in quicker playbook runs
due to less importing of unneccessary tasks.
One side effect of this is that child tasks of dynamic includes do not
inherit their parents' tags so you must tag them explicitly or a block.
Use dynamic includes instead of static imports when you are running
tasks conditionally or using variable interpolation. The down side
is that you need to then tag the parent task as well as all child
tasks, as tags only apply to children of statically imported tasks.
Instead of iterating over fifteen packages with a loop that does fifteen
separate apt transactions, it is better to give the apt module a list so
it can install them all in one transaction. This is both quicker and te-
chnically more safe for dependency resolution.
Instead of iterating over fifteen packages with a loop that does fifteen
separate apt transactions, it is better to give the apt module a list so
it can install them all in one transaction. This is both quicker and te-
chnically more safe for dependency resolution.
Use dynamic includes instead of static imports when you are running
tasks conditionally or using variable interpolation. The down side
is that you need to then tag the parent task as well as all child
tasks, as tags only apply to children of statically imported tasks.
Basically, when using conditionals or variables in your tasks you should
use include_tasks instead of import_tasks. The down side is that you now
need to tag all included tasks individually or with a block, unlike when
using static imports (tags are applied to all imported child tasks).
I would actually like to reduce this task to a single one that uses the
host's ansible_distribution variable, but Ansible 2.5.1 currently gives
the following error: ansible_distribution is undefined.
Vanilla Ubuntu (and Debian actually) defaults to using the official
mirror for security updates rather than country or regional mirrors.
Also, for what it's worth, Ubuntu mirrors didn't always sync these
security archives. I'd prefer to stay closer to vanilla Ubuntu but
also it kinda makes sense to get security updates from the official
source than a mirror (in case of delay or errors).
We stopped being able to do dynamic includes from the playbooks around
Ansible 2.4.0.0 if I recall correctly. Instead we can create a task to
include the variables and make it always run by using the special tag.
For now the Debian and Ubuntu vars files are the same, but I will keep
them separate so that it is more flexible in the future.
I had been using this from the stable-2.5 branch for a few weeks in
order to work around some issues with Jinja2 and ansible-vault, but
now that version 2.5.1 has been released I can use it directly from
pip.
