Configure web server on different type os using ansible and dynamically take software name according to os type

3 min readMar 30, 2021

Hello Everyone,

I want to show how I have configured the webserver on different types of OS like RedHat and Ubuntu. My ansible-playbook will dynamically take software names according to OS type. As we know that in ubuntu apache webserver software name is “apache2” and in RedHat Apache webserver software is “httpd”.So we don’t need of separate configuration for both the OS from one playbook we can configure every type of OS.

I have two target nodes one traget node is running in my local VM which is redhat8 and another trarget node in running in the AWS cloud service ec2 this traget node is Ubuntu OS .

This target node 1: Redhat OS

This target node 2 Ubuntu OS: ec2 instance

Ubuntu OS

Inventory file

As previously I have mentioned I have two target nodes one running is running locally and one is running on ec2 instance. So in the inventory file, I have mentioned the SSH key for the ec2 instance and the password for the locally running VM.

ansible.cfg file

As we know that ec2 instance(target node 2) running over the AWS is of Ubuntu type and for login to this OS using ssh key we have to use “ubuntu” user. But by “ubuntu” user we can’t do the ansible task. So in the ansible.cfg file I have written the [ privilege_escalation ] keyword.

For dynamically taking software names according to OS type we will use a jinja template language in ansible playbook. So their are two variable file I have created RedHat.yml & Debian.yml. In which I have written software name, service name, content which will write on the web page.

RedHat.yml file

Debian.yml file

For configuring the webserver I have created web page index.html.

index.html file

inde.html

in the index.html file, I have given the {{ content }} variable for loading the content of the web page this content will be taken from the RedHat.yml and Debian.yml file.