DevOps

Quick one. While working on a build chain in order to register home-baked AMIs, I wanted to use the ansible-local packer provisioner to setup the instance with a very basic playbook. I needed to provide ansible a playbook but didn’t find immediately how to achieve this within the Jenkins-packer module. Turns out it’s tricky, in the JSON Template Text (or the template file), declare the playbook_file like this: [{ "type": "ansible-local", "playbook_file": "{{ user `test_yml` }}", "command": "PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 ansible-playbook" }] Then in the File Entries field, the Variable Name must be test_yml and File Contents filled with the playbook.

So you’re using AWS CloudFormation in order to bring up complex infrastructures; haven’t you already told yourself that instead of writing down all those JSON lines by hand, you could bring more fun to your architect life? I did, and I found a way to programmatically design a whole architecture using troposphere and boto3. Simply put, troposphere gives you bindings in order to generate CloudFormation’s JSON template, but hey, it’s python, meaning that you can create loops, use conditions and even dynamically build objects.