Ansible and Terraform - Better Together

This repository contains code examples for running Terraform and Ansible together in different configurations.

Run Ansible from Terraform

With local_exec

Use the code examples in the terraform_gcp or terraform_azure folders to see how this is done. Basically there are two steps. First is a remote exec which forces Terraform to wait until SSH is running to run Ansible. This can be anything, even an echo "Hello World" command. Then we execute an ansible-playbook command from the same machine where we ran terraform apply.

With remote_exec

The code example in the terraform_gcp directory has code for remote exec commented out. You can comment out the local_exec code and run this to have Ansible run on the remote host. With this method we first copy our playbook to the remote host, then we install and run Ansible locally there.

Run Terraform from Ansible

Ansible has a Terraform module that can trigger Terraform deployments and plans. You can also pull resource information back into Ansible: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/modules/terraform_module.html

Build System Images with Packer and Ansible

HashiCorp's Packer tool allows you to use your existing Ansible playbooks to easily build machine images on the cloud or virtualization platform of your choice. Packer uses a JSON file for configuration, and is run from the command line.

Integrate HashiCorp Vault with Ansible

You can easily fetch secrets from Vault using the Hashi Vault Ansible plugin: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/plugins/lookup/hashi_vault.html

This plugin is based on the excellent Python HVAC library: https://github.com/hvac/hvac