Tips and Tricks for Ansible Playbooks

Please take the following under consideration when developing your playbook:

  • Make sure the Execution Server can access the script’s raw URL.
  • When setting the VM user’s credentials in the App, make sure you provide the credentials of a user that has the necessary permissions to successfully execute all the playbook’s tasks.
  • If the App’s VM takes a long time to fully load, you may want to adjust the maximum time for the machine to respond, by setting the Timeout Minutes attribute on the Custom Script Configuration resource model (in Resource Manager Client’s Resource Families explorer).
  • Use the Ansible Additional Arguments attribute to specify more parameters that should run along with the ansible-playbook command (e.g. -vvv for easier debugging). The attribute resides in Resource Manager Client>Resource Families explorer>Configuration Services. For details about supported arguments, see the official Ansible documentation.
  • To use an Ansible playbook on a Windows VM, make sure WinRM is configured and loaded automatically to allow the playbook to communicate with that VM. A script for this is provided in CloudShell’s online help.