Documentation

2. Upgrading Ansible Tower

Note

You must upgrade your Ansible Tower 2.4.4 (or later) system to Ansible Tower 3.0 before you can upgrade beyond Ansible Tower 3.0.

2.1. Upgrade Planning

This section covers changes that you should keep in mind as you attempt to upgrade your Ansible Tower Instance

  • If you have been using Ansible version 2.5 with Ansible Tower version 3.2.0, 3.2.1, or 3.2.2, you may find that cloud inventory syncs have placed ordinary group or inventory variables inside of hostvars of member hosts. After upgrading to Ansible Tower 3.2.3, the variables will be returned inside of their respective groups or inside of the inventory variables. Since hostvars take precedence, variables that come from pre-migration updates may take precedence over their newer values, resulting in a variable precedence conflict. Refer to Remediation Steps for Upgrade Variable Precedence Conflict for a workaround.
  • If you are not yet using a 2.4.x version of Ansible Tower, do not attempt to upgrade directly to Ansible Tower 3.0.x or 3.1.0. You must start with a system which has a verison of Tower 2.4.x installed or the upgrade will fail.
  • If you are not using using a 3.0.x version of Ansible Tower; you must upgrade to 3.0.x before you can upgrade beyond Ansible Tower 3.0.
  • Ansible Tower 3.0 simplified installation and removed the need to run ./configure/ as part of the initial setup.
  • The file tower_setup_conf.yml is no long used. Instead, you should now edit the inventory file in the /ansible-tower-setup-<tower_version>/ directory.
  • Earlier version of Tower used MongoDB when setting up an initial database; please note that Ansible Tower 3.0 has replaced the use of MongoDB with PostgreSQL.

2.1.1. Remediation Steps for Upgrade Variable Precedence Conflict

If you encounter a variable precedence conflict after upgrading to Ansible Tower 3.2.3, you can resolve this conflict by temporarily setting the inventory source’s overwrite_vars field to True and running an update. Apply this setting to all inventory sources that show the issue.

Inventories sourced from a project already require overwrite_vars to be set to True so they are not affected.

2.2. Obtaining Ansible Tower

Download and then extract the Ansible Tower installation/upgrade tool: http://releases.ansible.com/ansible-tower/setup/

root@localhost:~$ tar xvzf ansible-tower-setup-latest.tar.gz
root@localhost:~$ cd ansible-tower-setup-<tower_version>

To install or upgrade, start by editing the inventory file in the ansible-tower-setup-<tower_version> directory, replacing <tower_version> with the version number, such as 2.4.5 or 3.0.0. directory.

2.3. Setting up the Inventory File

As you edit your inventory file, there are a few things you must keep in mind:

  • The contents of the inventory file should be defined in ./inventory, next to the ./setup.sh installer playbook.

  • For installations and upgrades: If you need to make use of external databases, you must ensure the database sections of your inventory file are properly setup. Edit this file and add your external database information before running the setup script.

  • For clustered installations: If you are creating a clustered setup, you must replace localhost with the hostname or IP address of all instances. All nodes/instances must be able to reach any others using this hostname or address. In other words, you cannot use the localhost ansible_connection: local on one of the nodes AND all of the nodes should use the same format for the host names.

    Therefore, this will not work:

    [tower]
    localhost ansible_connection: local
    hostA
    hostB.example.com
    172.27.0.4
    

    Instead, use these formats:

    [tower]
    hostA
    hostB
    hostC
    

    OR

    hostA.example.com
    hostB.example.com
    hostC.example.com
    

    OR

    [tower]
    172.27.0.2
    172.27.0.3
    172.27.0.4
    
  • For all standard installations: When performing an installation, you must supply any necessary passwords in the inventory file.

Note

Changes made to the installation process now require that you fill out the all of the password fields in the inventory file. If you need to know where to find the values for these they should be:

admin_password='' <— Tower local admin password

pg_password='' <—- Found in /etc/tower/conf.d/postgres.py

rabbitmq_password='' <—- create a new password here (alpha-numeric with no special characters)

Example Inventory file

  • For provisioning new nodes: When provisioning new nodes add the nodes to the inventory file with all current nodes, make sure all passwords are included in the inventory file.
  • For upgrades: When upgrading, be sure to compare your inventory file to the current release version. It is recommended that you keep the passwords in here even when performing an upgrade.

Example Single Node Inventory File

[tower]
localhost ansible_connection=local

[database]

[all:vars]
admin_password='password'

pg_host=''
pg_port=''

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='password'

rabbitmq_port=5672
rabbitmq_vhost=tower
rabbitmq_username=tower
rabbitmq_password='password'
rabbitmq_cookie=rabbitmqcookie

# Needs to be true for fqdns and ip addresses
rabbitmq_use_long_name=false
# Needs to remain false if you are using localhost

Example Multi Node Cluster Inventory File

[tower]
clusternode1.example.com
clusternode2.example.com
clusternode3.example.com

[database]
dbnode.example.com

[all:vars]
ansible_become=true

admin_password='password'

pg_host='dbnode.example.com'
pg_port='5432'

pg_database='tower'
pg_username='tower'
pg_password='password'

rabbitmq_port=5672
rabbitmq_vhost=tower
rabbitmq_username=tower
rabbitmq_password=tower
rabbitmq_cookie=rabbitmqcookie

# Needs to be true for fqdns and ip addresses
rabbitmq_use_long_name=true

Example Inventory file for an external existing database

[tower]
node.example.com ansible_connection=local

[database]

[all:vars]
admin_password='password'
pg_password='password'
rabbitmq_password='password'


pg_host='database.example.com'
pg_port='5432'

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'

Example Inventory file for external database which needs installation

[tower]
node.example.com ansible_connection=local


[database]
database.example.com

[all:vars]
admin_password='password'
pg_password='password'
rabbitmq_password='password'

pg_host='database.example.com'
pg_port='5432'

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'

Once any necessary changes have been made, you are ready to run ./setup.sh.

Note

Root access to the remote machines is required. With Ansible, this can be achieved in different ways:

  • ansible_user=root ansible_ssh_password=”your_password_here” inventory host or group variables
  • ansible_user=root ansible_ssh_private_key_file=”path_to_your_keyfile.pem” inventory host or group variables
  • ANSIBLE_BECOME_METHOD=’sudo’ ANSIBLE_BECOME=True ./setup.sh
  • ANSIBLE_SUDO=True ./setup.sh

2.4. The Setup Playbook

Note

Ansible Tower 3.0 simplifies installation and removes the need to run ./configure/ as part of the installation setup. Users of older versions should follow the instructions available in the v.2.4.5 (or earlier) releases of the Tower Documentation available at: http://docs.ansible.com/

The Tower setup playbook script uses the inventory file and is invoked as ./setup.sh from the path where you unpacked the Tower installer tarball.

root@localhost:~$ ./setup.sh

The setup script takes the following arguments:

  • -h – Show this help message and exit
  • -i INVENTORY_FILE – Path to Ansible inventory file (default: inventory)
  • -e EXTRA_VARS – Set additional Ansible variables as key=value or YAML/JSON (i.e. -e bundle_install=false forces an online installation)
  • -b – Perform a database backup in lieu of installing
  • -r – Perform a database restore in lieu of installing (a default restore path is used unless EXTRA_VARS are provided with a non-default path, as shown in the code example below)
./setup.sh -e 'restore_backup_file=/path/to/nondefault/location' -r

Note

Please note that a issue was discovered in Tower 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 that prevented proper system backups and restorations.

If you need to back up or restore your Tower v3.0.0 or v3.0.1 installation, use the v3.0.2 installer to do so.