In this blog post, we will configure an Apache web server on a Linux Machine (Azure Virtual Machine) using Ansible. Apache web server is a free and open-source software that allows users to deploy their websites on the internet.

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with the concept of Infrastructure-as-Code (I.a.C) is helpful, but isn't necessary.
• A Linux VM: Although this action is performed on an Azure virtual machine, similar steps could be performed on any Linux distribution. You can follow this link to automate creation of virtual machines on Azure.

So, let's dive in.

What is Ansible, and why use it?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool that can be used to automate the configuration of servers and systems. It is a command-line IT automation software application that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and many other IT needs. Read more about Ansible here: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/index.html

Let's connect to our virtual machine via SSH. If you have not already created a vm, you can follow this link to automate creation of virtual machines on Microsoft Azure with Terraform. Connect to the virtual machine:

ssh linuxuser@ip_address

Make a directory/folder for this Ansible project and change directory to this folder.

mkdir ansible
cd ansible

Install Ansible

Make a file for the installation of Ansible. We will call this file installations.sh.

nano installation.sh

Copy the code below into the file installation.sh Note that python is required to perform Ansible operations, hence it needs to be installed also.

#!/bin/bash

sudo apt update

sudo apt install python3-pip

pip install boto3 botocore

pip install boto

sudo apt install ansible

Run the command to change the permission of the file and make it executable.