ansible-freeipa Experimentation Lab

The goal of this project is to provide a tool to create the necessary configuration to experiment with FreeIPA and ansible-freeipa using containers.

The tool ipalab-config generates the necessary files to create a compose of containers (using, for example, podman compose) and deploy FreeIPA on it using the ansible-freeipa collection.

Installation and Usage

The tool can be installed through pip:

pip install ipalab-config

To experiment with the latest branch:

pip install git+https://github.com/rjeffman/ipalab-config

Usage of Python's virtual environment is encouraged.

The only dependency for the tool is ruamel.yaml, but ansible-core will be required to run ansible-freeipa playbooks.

To create the configuration files simply invoke the tool with the path to the configuration file:

ipalab-config mycluster.yaml

For example, mycluster.yaml could define a cluster with three hosts, a primary server, a replica and a client, all using the default (fedora-latest) distro:

---
lab_name: simple-cluster
ipa_deployments:
  - name: cluster
    domain: ipa.test
    realm:  IPA.TEST
    admin_password: SomeADMINpassword
    dm_password: SomeDMpassword
    cluster:
      servers:
        - name: server
          capabilities:
            - CA
            - DNS
        - name: replica
      clients:
        - name: client

The output is a directory simple-cluster (defined by the attribute lab_name) containing a compose configuration file (compose.yml), compatible with Docker and Podman, an inventory file (inventory.yml), customized for the created environment, a containerfiles directory with the container files recipes to allow FreeIPA deployment in containers, and a playbooks directory with a install-cluster.yml playbook that can be used to deploy the whole cluster.

To bring up the compose, use podman compose tool. Native podman-compose is provided in a separate package (podman-compose on Fedora) which needs to be installed in advance. Once the package is available, run:

podman-compose up -d

To run the deployment playbook you'll need Ansible and the two collections: containers.podman, to communicate with podman, and ansible-freeipa collection (again, a virtual environment is encouraged):

pip install ansible-core
ansible-galaxy collection install containers.podman freeipa.ansible_freeipa

Deploy the cluster with:

ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml playbooks/install-cluster.yml

The configuration file

The configuration file is a YAML file with attributes used to set both the compose and inventory files.

Global attributes

Name	Description	Required	Default
lab_name	The name of the cluster, used as the name of the target directory and to derive some other names in the compose file, for example, the pod name.	yes	-
subnet	A CIDR representing the subnet to be used for the containers.	no	"192.168.159.0/24"
containerfiles	A list of file relative or absolute paths to container files.	no	-
container_fqdn	Convert container names to FQDN using deployment domain name.	no	false
ipa_deployments	A list of FreeIPA deployments. (See ipa-deployments.)	yes	-
external	A list of nodes external to the FReeIPA deployment.	no	-

ipa_deployments

Each entry in the ipa-deployments list define a FreeIPA cluster. All defined hosts will be composed in the same pod.

Name	Description	Required	Default
name	The cluster name, used to identify one cluster in the inventory file.	yes	-
domain	The domain for the cluster. FreeIPA rules for domain names apply.	no	"ipalab.local"
realm	The realm for the cluster.	no	Uppercase domain
admin_password	The FreeIPA admin password.	no	"SomeADMINpassword"
dm_password	The FreeIPA LDAP Directory Manager password.	no	"SomeDMpassword"
distro	The containerfile/image to use by default, on this deployment.	no	fedora-latest
cluster	A dict with the configuration for the nodes of the cluster. (See Cluster Nodes.)	yes	-
dns	An IP address or a node hostname to use as nameserver.	no	-

Cluster Nodes

The cluster nodes are defined for each deployment, and may have servers or clients. At least one 'server' should always be defined. If no server or client is defined, an error is returned.

The servers list is a list of the servers for the deployment. The order is important, as the first server configuration will be used as the initial server, and will always have CA capabilities. It will also be the initial CA renewal server of the deployment. The other servers can have any configuration, and will be considered replicas (in ansible-freeipa idiom).

These are the available options to configure the first server and the replicas:

Name	Description	Required	Default
name	The name of the server.	yes	-
hostname	The server hostname.	no	.
distro	The containerfile/image to use.	no	fedora-latest
volumes	A list of bind volume specifications.	no	-
dns	An IP address or a node hostname to use as nameserver.	no	-
capabilities	A list of capabilities to be deployed on the server. Available option are CA, DNS (nameserver), KRA, AD (AD trust), RSN (server only) and HIDDEN (replicas only).	no	For the first server CA is set.
memory	The maximum amount of memory to use defined as an integer number and a unit. The unit can be b, k or kb, m or mb, or g or gb (case insensitive).	no
vars	Dict of variables to use in the deployment of the server or replica. Check (ansible-freeipa roles documentation)[https://github.com/freeipa/ansible-freeipa/tree/master/roles] for valid values	no	-

The clients attribute is similar the the servers attribute, as it can be defined as a list of clients with its attributes, but it may also be defined with a dictionary containing:

Name	Description	Required	Default
hosts	The list of client nodes.	no	-
vars	Dict of variables to use in the deployment of all clients. Check (ansible-freeipa ipaclient documentation)[https://github.com/freeipa/ansible-freeipa/tree/master/roles/ipaclient] for valid values	no	-

To configure the clients, these are the available attributes:

Name	Description	Required	Default
name	The name of the client node.	yes	-
hostname	The node hostname.	no	.
distro	The containerfile/image to use.	no	fedora-latest
volumes	A list of bind volume specifications.	no	-
dns	An IP address or a node hostname to use as nameserver.	no	-
vars	Dict of variables to use in the deployment of this client node. Check (ansible-freeipa ipaclient documentation)[https://github.com/freeipa/ansible-freeipa/tree/master/roles/ipaclient] for valid values	no	-

See the available examples.

external

Used to define nodes external to the FreeIPA deployment.

Name	Description	Required	Default
domain	The domain for all the external hosts.	no	"ipalab.local"
hosts	The list of external nodes. (See External Nodes)	no	-

External Nodes

These are nodes that are not part of the FreeIPA deployment, and may or may not have a specific role in the environment. The following options are available:

Name	Description	Required	Default
name	The name of the node.	yes	-
hostname	The node hostname.	no	.
distro	The containerfile/image to use.	no	fedora-latest
volumes	A list of bind volume specifications.	no	-
dns	An IP address or a node hostname to use as nameserver.	no	-
role	A specific role that will add pre-defined configuration to the node and the environment. Any role configuration will overwrite other options.	no	-
options	A dictionary of configurations specific to the available roles.	no	-

Currently there's only one role defined:

Role dns

The node with role: dns provides a nameserver for the whole environment, and all the nodes in the environment will have DNS search set to use this node. The node provides the Unbound nameserver. The container accepts a volume containing the unbound configuration mounted at /etc/unbound. Note that the name of the main configuration file must be unbound.conf.

The available options for dns is the zones, a list of zone configuration that must have a file attribute, with the path to a zone file, and a name attribute with the zone name. For arpa zones (reverse zones with PTR records), instead of name the attribute reverse_ip with a network CIDR value can be used and the reverse zone name is automatically generated.

Example using zone files:

- name: nameserver
  role: dns
  options:
    zones:
    - name: ipa.test
      file: ipa.zone
    - reverse_ip: "10.1.2.0/24"
      file: ipa_PTR.zone

Example using zone volumes:

- name: nameserver
  role: dns
  volumes: ["/hostPath:/etc/unbound:Z"]

Output Files

In the output directory the following files and directories are present:

File	Usage
compose.yml	The compose file to use with podman-compose
inventory.yml	An Ansible inventory file for the cluster with ansible-freeipa variables
hosts	A list with ip-hostnames pairs no be added to the host /etc/hosts so the nodes are accessible by name
requiremenst.yml	The Ansible collection requirements no deploy the cluster
containerfiles	A collection of containerfiles for some Linux images where FreeIPA server and/or client is known to work with this configuration
playbooks	A directory where the 'install-cluster.yml' playbook and any additional playbook is stored

Playbooks

It is possible to provide a set of Ansible playbooks along with the configurations files by using the -p/--playbook command line option. This will a any file to the output playbooks directory.

If pass a directory as argument to -p the directory will be searched recursively for *.yml and *.yaml files and add them to the playbooks directory.

Note that the playbooks directory is flat, so if your files share the same file name, the last file will overwrite the other files with the same name.

Contributing

Issue tracker and repository are hosted on Github.

Use them to report issues or propose changes.

Known Issues

See ISSUES.md

License

The code is released under the 0BSD (BSD Zero Clause License).

Author

Rafael Jeffman (@rjeffman)