Deploying Nginx with Ansible: Complete Playbook and Configuration Guide

The article presents a practical Ansible playbook for deploying Nginx on three hosts (192.168.236.182, 192.168.236.180, 192.168.236.181), showing how to automate package installation, user/group creation, source extraction, compilation, and service startup.

Environment : The control node (ansible) resides at 192.168.236.182, while the target nodes for Nginx installation are 192.168.236.180 and 192.168.236.181.

Role directory structure (displayed with tree -L 4) includes folders such as default, files (containing nginx-1.20.2.tar.gz and nginx.service), handlers, meta, tasks, and templates (with index.html.j2 and nginx.conf.j2).

Main task file (tasks/main.yml) defines the following steps (code snippets shown in ... blocks):

- name: copy nginx
  copy: src=nginx-1.20.2.tar.gz dest=/usr/local/src/

- name: create group nginx
  group: name=nginx state=present system=yes

- name: create user nginx
  user: name=nginx system=yes shell=/sbin/nologin group=nginx

- name: yum pcre pcre-devel openssl openssl-devel zlib zlib-devel gcc-c++
  yum: name={{ item }} state=present
  with_items:
    - pcre
    - pcre-devel
    - openssl
    - openssl-devel
    - zlib
    - zlib-devel
    - gcc-c++

- name: unarchive nginx
  unarchive: src=/usr/local/src/nginx-1.20.2.tar.gz dest=/usr/local/src/

- name: install nginx
  shell: chdir=/usr/local/src/nginx-1.20.2 --prefix=/usr/local/nginx --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_ssl_module && make && make install

- name: copy nginx.conf
  template: src=nginx.conf.j2 dest=/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

- name: nginx start
  shell: /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

To run the playbook, execute ansible-playbook nginx.yml from the control node, as illustrated by the screenshots included in the original article.

After execution, the article shows how to verify that Nginx is running on the target machines, again using screenshots of the status check.

Overall, the guide provides a reproducible method for automating Nginx deployment with Ansible, suitable for DevOps and operations teams.