How To Create A DreamHost Cloud Server From An Ansible Playbook

Install Shade library

Shade is a library developed by OpenStack to simplify interactions with OpenStack clouds, like DreamHost.

$ pip install shade

Write a Playbook to Launch a Server

Create a file named launch-server.yaml, that will be our playbook.

The first part of the playbook is a list of hosts that your playbook will run on, we only have one, localhost.

- hosts: localhost

Then we need to define a list of tasks to perform in this playbook. We will only have one that launches an Ubuntu Xenial server on DreamCompute.

tasks:
  - name: launch an Ubuntu server

Next part of the playbook uses the os_server (OpenStack Server) module. This defines what the server has to look like in DreamCompute.

os_server:

First step is to authenticate to DreamCompute; substitute {username} with your DreamCompute username, {password} with your DreamCompute password, and {project} with your DreamCompute project. You’ll find those in the OpenStack RC file.

  auth:
    auth_url: https://iad2.dream.io:5000
    username: {username}
    password: {password}
    project_name: {project}

Next lines define some elements of the new server.

  state: present
  name: ansible-vm1
  image: Ubuntu-16.04
  key_name: {keyname}
  flavor: 50
  network: public
  wait: yes

Lets break down the previous few lines:

state is the state of the server, possible values are present or absent
name is the name of the server to create; can be any value
image is the image to boot the server from; possible values are visible on DreamHost Cloud web panel; the variable accepts either image name or UUID
key_name is the name of the public key to add to the server once it is created; this can be any key has already been added to DreamCompute.
flavor is the flavor of server to boot; this defines how much RAM and CPU your server will have; the variable accepts either the name of a flavor (gp1.semisonic) or the ID (50, 100, 200, etc)
network is the network to put your server on. In DreamHost Cloud case it is the public network.
wait set to yes forces the playbook to wait for the server to be created before continuing.

Running the Playbook

Run the Ansible playbook:

$ ansible-playbook launch-server.yaml

You should see output like

PLAY [localhost]
***************************************************************

TASK [setup]
*******************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [launch an Ubuntu server]
***********************************************
changed: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP
*********************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0

Now if you check the DreamHost Cloud dashboard you should see a new instance named “ansible-vm1”