After installing an image to an SD card, and booting up a Raspberry Pi device with the new operating system, it’s time for the repetitive task of adding users, installing software and configuring it. For one device this might be ok, but what if you have to configure two or ten with the same parameters? And what if you want to change to bigger SD cards with newer operating system image in your tinkering environment?

Ansible to the rescue. It is a tool for configuring and managing computers that runs over an SSH connection and doesn’t require any client software to be installed on the managed computers. It also has a repository for user-made configuration scripts, or roles, called Ansible Galaxy.

Required hardware and software

• Raspberry Pi(s) with Raspbian (Installation instructions)
• Internet connectivity and IP address of the Raspberry Pi
• Ansible (Installation instructions)
• Clone of raspberry-ansible repository

I have used the Raspbian Jessie lite image on Raspberry Pi 2 model B, but all models and both versions of the Raspbian image should work.

Repository file structure

./bootstrap.yml
./hosts
./keys/
./roles/firewall/
./roles/raspbian_bootstrap/

• bootstrap.yml is an Ansible playbook that contains instructions about which roles are run on which hosts, and with which variables.
• hosts has a list of hosts where the configurations are run into.
• keys is a directory for SSH keys for passwordless access to the Raspberries.
• roles/firewall contains tasks for setting up firewall.
• roles/raspbian_bootstrap has lots of tasks for setting up user, hostname, apt, etc. This is a fork of debian_boostrap by Emilien Mantel with minor modifications to suit Raspbian.

Configuring device(s)

The devices are listed in hosts file with the following simple syntax:

raspberry1 ansible_host=192.168.100.37

where first word is the desired hostname for the device (used as an ansible alias and changed to be the device’s hostname). Connection will be made to the IP address given in ansible_host always.

Multiple devices can be listed with each on their own line.

Configuring SSH keys

SSH keys can be generated with for example Atlassian’s instructions. This will give you a private and a public key (id_rsa and id_rsa.pub respectively).

Public key has to be copied to the Raspberry, and these Ansible scripts will do it as long as the file location is correct in bootstrap.yml. Private key is used when connecting to the device: after public key is set up correctly to the device, password authentication is no longer needed and the keys are used instead.

I have used keys generated specifically for this task and put them in this repository’s keys directory, but they can be in your home directory as well. In this case, these configuration parameters in bootstrap.yml have to be changed:

ansible_ssh_private_key_file: "keys/id_rsa"
dbs_ssh_pubkey: "{{ lookup('file', 'keys/id_rsa.pub') }}"

Running the playbook

The playbook is run with the following command:

ansible-playbook -i hosts bootstrap.yml --ask-pass

On the first run to a fresh Raspbian install with no SSH keys configured, it will ask for pi-user password (raspberry by default). Then it will ask to what this password will be changed into:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts bootstrap.yml --ask-pass
SSH password:
Enter new password for user pi:

PLAY [all] *********************************************************************
...

Testing the changes

After all, there aren’t that many visible changes as these roles will do just basic housekeeping that probably would have been left undone unless it was automated.

Anyways, now you should be able to log in with the SSH key and see the changed hostname for example:

$ ssh pi@192.168.100.37 -i keys/id_rsa
...
pi@raspberry1:~ $

Or you can check for NTP status:

$ ntpq -p
 remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+dsl-kpobrasgw1- .PPS.            1 u  233  256  377   42.722   -2.835   1.288
*ntp2.tdc.fi     .PPS.            1 u   64  256  367   15.933    0.240   1.363
-ns2.posiona.net 192.36.133.17    2 u  190  256  377   15.099    0.149   0.637
+87-92-47-29.bb. 192.36.144.23    2 u  259  256  377   13.248   -0.295   0.683

More interesting configurations in the next post!