Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By : Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA
Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By: Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA

Overview of this book

Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat. We’ll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You’ll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you’ll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you’ll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we’ll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles
5
Automating Web Application Security Testing Using OWASP ZAP

Setting up the development environment


The primary requirement for Ansible 2.4 is Python 2.6 or higher and Python 3.5 or higher. If you have either of them installed, we can follow the simple steps to get the development environment going.

From the Ansible Developer Guide:

  1. Clone the Ansible repository: $ git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
  2. Change the directory into the repository root directory: $ cd ansible
  3. Create a virtual environment: $ python3 -m venv venv (or for Python 2 $ virtualenv venv
  4. Note, this requires you to install the virtualenv package: $ pip install virtualenv
  5. Activate the virtual environment: $ . venv/bin/activate
  6. Install the development requirements: $ pip install -r requirements.txt
  7. Run the environment setup script for each new dev shell process: $ . hacking/env-setup

You should end up with a venv prompt at this point. Here is a simple playbook to set up the development environment.

The following playbook will set up the developer environment by installing and setting...