As Tower can be installed in various ways by choosing the best mode for your environment and making any necessary modifications to the inventory file:
Tower can be installed using one of the following scenarios:
Single Machine:
Note
1). Tower will not configure replication or failover for the database that it uses, although Tower should work with any replication that you have. 2). The database server should be on the same network or in the same datacenter as the Tower server for performance reasons.
Active/Passive Redundancy Multi-Machine:
Tower can be installed in an active-passive redundancy mode. In this mode, Tower runs with one ‘primary’ node active at any time, and any number of passive ‘secondary’ nodes that can be made active if necessary.
Note
Running in a redundancy setup requires any database that Tower uses to be external–Postgres must be installed on a machine that is not one of the primary or secondary tower nodes. When in a redundant setup, the remote Postgres version requirements is Postgresql 9.4.x.
As you edit your inventory file, there are a few things you must keep in mind:
./inventory
, next to the ./setup.sh
installer playbook.localhost
with the hostname or IP address of the primary instance.admin_password='password'
redis_password='password'
pg_password='password'
Note
Redis passwords must not contain spaces or any of the following characters: @
, :
, -
, \
, /
For example, Passw0rd
is acceptable, but P@ssword
is not. (It is not recommended that you use this example password as anything other than an example. Setting your actual password to anything other than a secure password that is only known by you or your trusted administration staff is extremly dangerous.)
Example Inventory File
[primary]
localhost ansible_connection=local
[secondary]
[database]
[all:vars]
admin_password='password'
redis_password='password'
pg_host=''
pg_port=''
pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='password'
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_ssh_user=root ansible_ssh_password=”your_password_here” inventory host or group variables
- ansible_ssh_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
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 retorations.
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.
After calling ./setup.sh
with the appropriate parameters, Tower is installed on the appropriate machines as has been configured. Setup installs Tower from RPM or Deb packages using repositories hosted on ansible.com.
Once setup is complete, use your web browser to access the Tower server and view the Tower login screen. Your Tower server is accessible from port 80 (http://tower.company.com/).
If the installation of Tower fails and you are a customer who has purchased a valid license for Ansible Tower, please contact Ansible via the Red Hat Customer portal at https://access.redhat.com/.
Once installed, if you log into the Tower instance via SSH, the default admin password is provided in the prompt. You can then change it with the following command (as root or as AWX user):
tower-manage changepassword admin
After that, the password you have entered will work as the admin password in the web UI.