Managing Enterprise Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Procedure 8.2. Instructions

1. On your automation controller, configure an existing job template named Add Teams to use a webhook.

   1. Navigate to https://controller.lab.example.com and log in as the admin user with redhat as the password.

   2. Navigate to Resources → Templates and click the Edit Template icon for the Add Teams job template.

   3. Scroll down to the Options section and select Enable Webhook.

   4. In the Webhook details section, choose GitLab from the Webhook Service list.

   5. Click Save.

   6. On the Details tab, take note of the Webhook URL and Webhook Key values needed to configure the webhook in GitLab in the next step.

      Figure 8.9: Webhook configuration in job template

2. On your GitLab server, create a webhook for the Code Collection Git repository that notifies your automation controller about push events.

   Important

   The lab start code-webhooks script has run as an administrator on your GitLab server to allow its users to create webhooks, so you do not need to do that part of the configuration.

   1. Navigate to https://git.lab.example.com and log in as the student user using Student@123 as the password.

   2. Navigate to Projects → Your projects → Code Collection, and then navigate to Settings → Webhooks in the left panel.

   3. On the webhook configuration page, create the webhook by adding the Webhook URL and Webhook Key values, obtained from automation controller in the previous step, to the URL and Secret token fields, respectively.

      Figure 8.10: Webhook configuration in GitLab

      Important

      The preceding screen capture is only an illustration. Use the URL and Secret token values for your own environment. Use the Webhook URL and Webhook Key values that you generated in your automation controller UI for your URL and Secret token fields.

   4. Select Push events and clear Enable SSL verification.

      Note

      Normally, you would not disable SSL verification. You would instead ensure that both automation controller and GitLab could validate each other’s TLS/SSL certificates.

   5. Click Add webhook to save the webhook.

   6. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. In the Project Hooks section, notice that you now have one webhook configured. Click Test and choose Push events to test the webhook. You should see the Hook executed successfully message.

3. Test the webhook by making a change to the code-collection Git repository.

   1. As the student user on the workstation machine, create the /home/student/git-repos directory if it does not already exist, and then change into it.

      [student@workstation ~]$ mkdir -p ~/git-repos/
      [student@workstation ~]$ cd ~/git-repos/

   2. Clone the code-collection.git repository and then change into the cloned repository:

      [student@workstation git-repos]$ git clone \
      > https://git.lab.example.com/git/code-collection.git
      Cloning into 'code-collection'...
      ...output omitted...
      [student@workstation git-repos]$ cd code-collection

   3. Edit the add_teams.yml file and add the '{{ team_operations }}' variable to the team_array variable. The content of the add_teams.yml file should contain the following.

      ---
      - name: Add team
        hosts: localhost
        gather_facts: False
        vars_files:
          - vars/auth.yml
          - vars/users_teams.yml
        vars:
          team_array:
            - '{{ team1 }}'
            - '{{ team2 }}'
            - '{{ team3 }}'
            - '{{ team_developers }}'
            - '{{ team_operations }}'

   4. Commit and push the changes to the remote Git repository.

      [student@workstation code-collection]$ git add add_teams.yml
      [student@workstation code-collection]$ git commit -m "Added Operations team"
      [main d164229] Added Operations team
       1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
      [student@workstation code-collection]$ git push -u origin main
      Enumerating objects: 5, done.
      Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
      Delta compression using up to 4 threads
      Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
      Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 298 bytes | 298.00 KiB/s, done.
      Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
      To https://git.lab.example.com/git/code-collection.git
         c967656..d164229  main -> main
      Branch 'main' set up to track remote branch 'main' from 'origin'.

   5. In the automation controller web UI, navigate to View → Jobs.

   6. Your git push command launched the Add Teams job template and started the jobs Source Control Update, Inventory Sync, and Playbook Run.

   7. After the Playbook Run job is successful, navigate to Access → Teams and verify that all the teams now exist in automation controller.

   8. (Optional) Display the content of the vars/users_teams.yml file to verify the team_operations definition. Use redhat123 as a Vault password.

      [student@workstation code-collection]$ ansible-vault view vars/users_teams.yml
      Vault password: redhat123
      ...output omitted...
      team_operations:
        name: Operations
        description: Ops Team
        organization: Default
        users:
          - username: oliver
            first_name: Oliver
            last_name: Stone
            email: oliver@lab.example.com
            password: redhat123
            update_secrets: false
            is_superuser: false
            is_system_auditor: false
      ...output omitted...