Raspberry Pi Ansible

Glenn K. Lockwood, August 2017

Introduction

This is an Ansible configuration that configures a fresh Raspbian installation on Raspberry Pi. This is very much a work in progress and not intended to be used by anyone but me.

Bootstrapping on Raspbian

If you want to use these playbooks to make a Raspberry Pi self-configure, install Ansible by doing the following:

$ pip install --user ansible
$ ssh-keygen
$ ssh-copy-id localhost

If not bootstrapping from the Raspberry Pi itself, you can instead do

$ ssh-copy-id pi@raspberrypi

and authenticate using the default raspberry password. This will enable key-based authentication to the remote Raspberry Pi to be configured.

You can ensure that Ansible is able to configure using the following:

$ ansible -i hosts all -m ping

You can also ensure that authentication also works.

$ ansible -i hosts -u pi --sudo-user root all -a "/usr/bin/id -u"

Running the Playbook

This playbook will deactivate password authentication for the pi user since it assumes that you have key-based authentication configured before the playbook is executed. Be sure that is the case or you may be locked out of your Raspberry Pi altogether.

Then run the playbook:

$ ansible-playbook --inventory-file hosts --limit cloverfield --user pi --sudo site.yml

or

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts -l clovermine -u pi -s site.yml

Raspbian should allow the pi user to sudo without a password. If not, run using --ask-become-pass (or -K) and enter the sudo password (default would be raspberry) for the remote user (pi).