Getting Started: Tower Installer

Welcome to the first in our series of blog posts for Getting Started with Ansible Tower. This series covers basic installation and functions of Tower and an overview of how to use Tower to implement IT automation.

To get started with Tower, you must first learn to install and stand up a single host. Future posts will cover other types of configurations, such as a redundant installation with an external database. For this post, we’ll be highlighting RHEL 7 and Ubuntu LTS. 

Install Tower in 4 Simple Steps:

1. Download the latest Tower edition

If you haven’t already, visit this link to the trial page to have a download link sent to you. If you would like, our AMIs for AWS and our vagrant image are found there as well. If you have network restrictions, contact Ansible Sales and they can send you the bundled installer.

Note: We are currently working on a bundled installer for Ubuntu LTS, so the standard installer will install for Ubuntu.

2. Unpack the file (tar xzvf towerlatest)

 
$ tar xzvf towerlatest
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/group_vars/
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/group_vars/all
...

-tar xzvf towerbundlelatest

 
$ tar xzvf towerbundlelatest
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/group_vars/
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/group_vars/all
...

3. Edit the inventory file and set passwords

This is where you will be setting your passwords for admin_password, rabbitmq_password and pg_password. Tower requires your password to be a minimum of 8 characters with no special characters (/ ! # $ % ^ @ & *).
(/ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/inventory) (/ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.1.0-1.el7/inventory)

 
[tower]
localhost ansible_connection=local

[database]

[all:vars]
admin_password=''

pg_host=''
pg_port=''

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password=''

rabbitmq_port=5672
rabbitmq_vhost=tower
rabbitmq_username=tower
rabbitmq_password=''
rabbitmq_cookie=cookiemonster

# Needs to be true for fqdns and ip addresses
rabbitmq_use_long_name=false

4. Run the setup script

 
$./setup.sh 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done

That’s it! Once the installation has completed successfully, you can navigate to your Tower host using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox web browsers by browsing to the host by using either the hostname or IP address.

Recap

1. Download the towerlatest file
2. Unpack towerlatest
3. Edit the inventory file to set your passwords
4. Run the setup script

Installing Tower is a simple process that can quickly give you a basic overview to see what Ansible and Tower can do for your IT inventory. Future posts will cover other configurations that may more resemble your test environments.