Ansible Tower.. Not Worth The Effort.

So a month ago I decided to try out Tower on a trial basis.  I was plagued with issues from the start.  First off the installer would bomb out.. long story short due to missing values in teh Inventory file.  Why were they missing?  Because the documentation failed to explain in great enough detail that you had to specify 'localhost' instead the actual hostname and that you had to specify a pg port of 5342 AND that the installer looks for a separate database by default.  No prompts or anything.
Then once I finally got it fully installed and working.. a day later it'd fail to authenticate 'admin' in the web interface.  You can change the admin accounts password via the command line however that even does not work.  The only fix I found was a reinstall.. which yeah, there goes your config.

Anyway Red Hat can kiss it for now.  Maybe when it goes Open Source next year it'll be more stable.

Ansible Tower, Please Configure Passwords In The Inventory File - UPDATE-

So I previously posted about installing Ansible Tower and the trickiness with teh Inventory file.  Well it took two weeks and Red Hat support emails but I finally got Tower installed fully and with zero errors.

Ok so the environment I have is for testing alone, so both Tower and teh db are on localhost... because localhost is best host.  Anyway so you have to set the database variable to localhost plus specifying localhost and port 5432.. see below:

[primary]
localhost ansible_connection=local
[secondary]
[database]
localhost
[all:vars]
admin_password='passwd_here'
redis_password='passwd_here'
pg_host='localhost'
pg_port='5432'
pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='passwd_here'

Ansible Tower, Please Configure Passwords In The Inventory File

So lately I've been trying to setup Ansible, and seeing as how.. hopefully by next summer Red Hat will release their Open-Source version of Tower I wanted to get familiar with it early on.

Let me tell you right off the bat, the official Docs are lacking in the initial setup/install department!  I've been exchanging emails with a pre-sales support guy for a week now.  Which incidentally his replies usually take about 24 hours to get her for some reason... Anyway  so after many, MANY failed attempts are running setup.sh correctly I finally found out that one definite place the docs are mssing info is the Inventory file.

According to $Support the ansible Inventory file is only used for the install process.  Reading their docs: Ansible Install Guide I am led to believe that the Inventory file will control what clients Tower will manage.

So here's my Inventory file that worked:

[mtops@ansible ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.0.3-1.el7]$ cat inventory

[primary]

localhost ansible_connection=local

[secondary]

[database]

[all:vars]

admin_password='manually_set_passwd'

redis_password='manually_set_passwd'

pg_host='localhost'

pg_port=''

pg_database='awx'

pg_username='awx'

pg_password='manually_set_passwd'

[mtops@ansible ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.0.3-1.el7]$

 I tried specifying my clients by host name in this file and it'd fail.  I then tried some weirdness I found online somewhere about adding a like that specified your clients ssh username/passwd.  My install is using the bundle so the setup.sh is also installing a MongoDB (I believe) so if you are using an external DB server you'd specify the connection strings in here too.