Docker Cookbook

See Also
• Wharfee 
source code
• Wharfee official 
website
7.7 Using the Wharfee Interactive Shell | 209

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7.8 Orchestrating Containers with Ansible Docker Module
Problem
You have developed some expertise with 
Ansible
to configure your servers and
orchestrate application deployment. You would like to take advantage of this exper‐
tise and use Ansible to manage Docker containers.
Solution
Use the Ansible Docker 
module
. This module is part of the Ansible core, so after
installing Ansible, no additional packages need to be installed.
Ansible will run from your local machine, connect over SSH to your Docker hosts,
and use the 
docker-py
API client to issue calls to the Docker daemon.
For example, to start an Nginx container in detached mode with a port mapping, you
would write an Ansible 
playbook
 like this:
- hosts: nginx
tasks:
- name: Run nginx container
docker: image=nginx:latest detach=true ports=80:80
Discussion about how to use Ansible is beyond the scope of this
recipe. See the Ansible 
documentation
.
Discussion
To get you up and running with the Ansible Docker module, you can use the
Vagrantfile accompanying this recipe. This will start a virtual machine acting as a
Docker host with the 
docker-py
client installed. Two playbooks, an inventory file,
and some Ansible configurations are also available to make it turnkey.
The first task is to install Ansible on your local machine:
$ sudo pip install ansible
Then to test the Nginx playbook, follow these instructions:
$ git clone https://github.com/how2dock/docbook.git
$ cd ch07/ansible
$ tree
.
├── README.md
├── Vagrantfile