Ansible Tower / AWX – Installing & Configuring Tower-cli

Tower-CLI (tower-cli) is a command line tool for managing Ansible Tower/AWX. It allows Tower commands to be easily run from the Unix/Linux command line. This command line tool sends commands to the Tower RESTful API. It is capable of retrieving, creating, modifying, and deleting most resources within the Tower. It also used for creating objects like organizations, users, teams, and more in bulk. In this article, we will walk through how to install and configure tower-cli.

Installing Tower-cli:

Here are the few links useful links to know more about tower-cli.

• Github
• Tower-cli Readdocs

1.  Login to any of the Linux instance which has network connectivity to reach ansible Tower/AWX.

 

2. Use pip module to install tower-cli.

# pip install ansible-tower-cli
DEPRECATION: Python 3.4 support has been deprecated. pip 19.1 will be the last one supporting it. Please upgrade your Python as Python 3.4 won't be maintained after March 2019 (cf PEP 429).
Collecting ansible-tower-cli
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/e6/e2/818a85d8c7c5337957cc963b4db393e0c45f822db871df4e0a329c0cb969/ansible-tower-cli-3.3.3.tar.gz (200kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 204kB 1.9MB/s
Requirement already satisfied: click>=2.1 in /usr/lib64/python3.4/site-packages (from ansible-tower-cli) (7.0)
Collecting colorama>=0.3.1 (from ansible-tower-cli)
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/4f/a6/728666f39bfff1719fc94c481890b2106837da9318031f71a8424b662e12/colorama-0.4.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Collecting requests>=2.3.0 (from ansible-tower-cli)
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/7d/e3/20f3d364d6c8e5d2353c72a67778eb189176f08e873c9900e10c0287b84b/requests-2.21.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Requirement already satisfied: six>=1.7.2 in /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from ansible-tower-cli) (1.12.0)
Requirement already satisfied: PyYAML>=3.10 in /usr/lib64/python3.4/site-packages (from ansible-tower-cli) (3.13)
Collecting urllib3<1.25,>=1.21.1 (from requests>=2.3.0->ansible-tower-cli)
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/62/00/ee1d7de624db8ba7090d1226aebefab96a2c71cd5cfa7629d6ad3f61b79e/urllib3-1.24.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Collecting certifi>=2017.4.17 (from requests>=2.3.0->ansible-tower-cli)
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/60/75/f692a584e85b7eaba0e03827b3d51f45f571c2e793dd731e598828d380aa/certifi-2019.3.9-py2.py3-none-any.whl (158kB)
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Collecting idna<2.9,>=2.5 (from requests>=2.3.0->ansible-tower-cli)
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/14/2c/cd551d81dbe15200be1cf41cd03869a46fe7226e7450af7a6545bfc474c9/idna-2.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Collecting chardet<3.1.0,>=3.0.2 (from requests>=2.3.0->ansible-tower-cli)
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/bc/a9/01ffebfb562e4274b6487b4bb1ddec7ca55ec7510b22e4c51f14098443b8/chardet-3.0.4-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: colorama, urllib3, certifi, idna, chardet, requests, ansible-tower-cli
  Running setup.py install for ansible-tower-cli ... done
Successfully installed ansible-tower-cli-3.3.3 certifi-2019.3.9 chardet-3.0.4 colorama-0.4.1 idna-2.8 requests-2.21.0 urllib3-1.24.1
#

 

Configuring tower-cli:

3. Check tower-cli command to check the version.

# tower-cli --version
Tower CLI 3.3.3
#

 

4. Here is the help page of tower-cli.

# tower-cli --help
Usage: tower-cli [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --version  Display tower-cli version.
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  config
  empty
  login
  logout
  receive
  send
  version

Resources:
  activity_stream
  ad_hoc
  application
  credential
  credential_type
  group
  host
  instance
  instance_group
  inventory
  inventory_script
  inventory_source
  inventory_update
  job
  job_template
  label
  node
  notification_template
  organization
  project
  project_update
  role
  schedule
  setting
  team
  user
  workflow
  workflow_job
#

 

5. Set the Ansible Tower or AWX URL to tower-cli config using the following command.

# tower-cli config host  http://192.168.3.151:80
Configuration updated successfully.
[root@ansible-server ~]#

 

6. Set the privileged account for authenticating to Ansible Tower on Tower CLI

# tower-cli config username admin
Configuration updated successfully.
#

 

7. Set the admin password on Tower CLI for your ansible tower/AWXinstance.

# tower-cli config password password
Configuration updated successfully.
#

 

8. Set Verify SSL as false. (it might vary depends on your ansible Tower site protocal).

# tower-cli config verify_ssl False
Configuration updated successfully.
#

 

9. Preview the config of tower-cli using the following command.

# tower-cli config

# User options (set with `tower-cli config`; stored in ~/.tower_cli.cfg).
host: http://192.168.3.151:80
username: admin
password: password
verify_ssl: False

# Defaults.
use_token: False
verbose: False
color: True
format: human
description_on: False
oauth_token:
certificate:

 

10. How to confirm tower-cli is authenticating to Ansible tower successfully? Let’s fire a command to get all the recent job list. Tower CLI  reaches Ansile tower’s API to fetch the required information.

# tower-cli job list
== ============ =========================== ========== =======
id job_template           created             status   elapsed
== ============ =========================== ========== =======
 2            8 2019-02-07T10:28:13.948412Z failed     39.379
 3            8 2019-02-07T10:31:00.186924Z failed     51.828
 5            8 2019-02-07T10:37:09.624645Z successful 14.449
 6            8 2019-02-10T14:46:07.976987Z successful 105.96
 8            8 2019-02-12T04:28:34.931495Z failed     27.8
10            9 2019-02-14T09:56:08.032293Z failed     100.071
11            9 2019-02-14T09:56:16.511592Z failed     103.115
12            9 2019-02-14T10:01:23.660126Z failed     83.519
13            9 2019-02-14T10:13:38.688370Z failed     55.554
14            9 2019-02-14T10:16:31.008844Z failed     147.355
15            9 2019-02-14T10:23:13.988453Z failed     8.485
16            9 2019-02-14T10:26:26.564401Z failed     56.195
17            9 2019-02-14T10:27:52.923873Z successful 56.675
18            9 2019-02-14T10:29:06.720117Z successful 90.475
20            9 2019-02-14T11:09:15.408563Z successful 58.688
21            8 2019-02-14T11:10:17.883486Z successful 16.587
22           11 2019-02-15T16:03:36.592674Z failed     16.334
24            8 2019-02-18T22:18:37.405056Z successful 34.198
25            8 2019-02-18T22:54:39.413030Z successful 82.732
26            8 2019-02-19T12:00:45.025173Z successful 57.911
== ============ =========================== ========== =======

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