+++ author = "Chris Short" categories = ["Ansible", "2016"] date = 2016-12-09T13:35:00Z description = "Setup Papertrail with a role for Ansible Galaxy" draft = true ShowToc = false slug = "ansible-role-for-papertrail" tags = ["ansible", "DevOps", "cloud native"] title = "Ansible Role for Papertrail"

+++

I have written my first publicly reusable Ansible role. It is freely available for use via Ansible Galaxy at chris-short.ansible-role-papertrail and helps you get Papertrail up and running.

What is Papertrail? A hosted log management tool that, in my opinion, can bridge the gap between your terminal and a full blown ELK stack. It is no frills streaming log aggregation and search.

Being my first Ansible role I have submitted to Galaxy I am pretty stoked about it. It did not come without finding a quirk or two but the role is updating from GitHub despite my issue. The role somehow makes it through to Galaxy regardless of this error. A huge thanks to Jeff Geerling for his work to make this so much easier and his advice.

{{< carbon >}}

One nifty feature I discovered while working on the Travis CI playbook was the addition of the ansible_pkg_mgr fact. This is awesome because you can apply tasks to systems that have a specific package manager. Previously you would need to address Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, and on, and on separately. Three tasks covered the all the OSes I really wanted to test (apt, dnf, and yum).