{"id":1239,"date":"2018-02-06T03:50:46","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T11:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/couchbase-and-ansible\/"},"modified":"2018-02-06T03:50:46","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T11:50:46","slug":"couchbase-and-ansible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/couchbase-and-ansible\/","title":{"rendered":"Couchbase and Ansible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Arkadiusz Borucki works as<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>a<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>Site Reliability Engineer at Amadeus, focused on NoSQL databases and automation. In his day-to-day work, he uses Couchbase, MongoDB, Oracle, Python, and Ansible. He\u2019s a self-proclaimed big data enthusiast, interested in data store technologies, distributed systems, analytics, and automation. He speaks at several conferences and user groups in the United States and Europe. You can find him on Twitter at\u00a0<\/em>@_Aras_B<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Arkadiusz<\/p>\n\n\n\n

{{ Couchbase \u2013 writing your first Ansible automation <\/strong>}}<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Couchbase is a modern, fast, scalable, and easy to automate technology. When you are running a Couchbase farm with thousands of nodes you do not want to have to log on to every single machine and apply settings manually. This could result in huge overhead, inconsistencies, and human errors. A good solution is to start using Ansible<\/a> for your farm automation and orchestration. You can run operating system <\/strong>commands from Ansible, make Couchbase API<\/strong>\u00a0calls from Ansible, or use\u00a0Couchbase CLI<\/strong>\u00a0commands from Ansible. This blog will show you how to start using Ansible with your Couchbase farm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you create Ansible automation for a Couchbase cluster<\/a> you should think about what you want to achieve. If you do not want to apply a complicated set of commands on your Couchbase farm the simplest solution is to create a basic Ansible playbook and put your playbook tasks in specific order. This solution is very simple and fast. Playbook syntax is not complicated and creation of a basic playbook takes just a few minutes! Playbooks are essentially sets of instructions (plays) that you will send to your host or group of hosts. Ansible will execute those instructions on targets and send you back return code. You will be able to validate if the instructions have been applied successfully or not. That’s basically how a playbook works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want to achieve more complicated results you should take advantage of Ansible roles and organize your tasks in roles. Roles are nothing but a further abstraction of making your playbook more modular. A role is a set of tasks and additional files to configure your Couchbase environment. Ansible roles will be described shortly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

{{ Playbook }}<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s build our first playbook. This playbook will install Couchbase Server on our hosts and get the server up and running. You no longer have to log on to every single machine and run commands there! If you want to save a lot of time for repeatable operations and avoid human errors you need to invest some time in automating and coding. All you need to do is just create Ansible playbook! Keeping that in mind, you need to understand logic that needs to be executed on a Couchbase farm. Ansible assumes you know what you are trying to do and automates it. Playbooks are instructions or directions for Ansible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A playbook is a text file written in YAML format, and is saved with yml extension. A playbooks uses indentation with space characters to indicate the structure of its data. There are two basic rules:<\/p>\n\n\n\n