2. Upgrading Ansible Tower¶

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.

2.2. 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.

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.

2.4. The Setup Playbook¶

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