How to get started running Ansible Semaphore in a podman pod

In the search of a more user friendly way to run playbooks for people unfamiliar with Ansible i stumbled across Semaphore and thought i'd give it a try. It promises a friendly UI , access control and logs with notifications for playbook runs. At first glance it looks like it may cut down on some of the complexity of AWX the upstream project for Ansible tower. Ansible-Semaphore main site

And they have an 'official' container build. Semaphore on Dockerhub

All sounds great.

While the handy availability of a docker build that probably did all i needed sounded great. Finding documentation from people who had run it was less prevalent.

The installation instructions for Semaphore are here https://github.com/ansible-semaphore/semaphore/wiki/Installation However they refer to an install on a base os only. I couldn't find anyone who ran this tool in podman either which is what my host is running.

They refer to running a mysql docker container to make a simple database and then running a script to install semaphore on the host.

After looking around a bit i found a snippet in a bug that talked about a docker-compose setup that could work.

https://github.com/ansible-semaphore/semaphore/issues/148

the key part was this docker compose file. 

services:
  mysql:
    image: mariadb:10
    environment:
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: 'yes'
      MYSQL_DATABASE: semaphore
      MYSQL_USER: semaphore
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: semaphore

  semaphore:
    image: ansiblesemaphore/semaphore
    environment:
      SEMAPHORE_DB_USER: semaphore
      SEMAPHORE_DB_PASS: semaphore
      SEMAPHORE_DB_HOST: mysql
      SEMAPHORE_DB_PORT: 3306
      SEMAPHORE_DB: semaphore
      SEMAPHORE_PLAYBOOK_PATH: /etc/semaphore
      SEMAPHORE_ADMIN_PASSWORD: password
      SEMAPHORE_ADMIN_NAME: "Developer"
      SEMAPHORE_ADMIN_EMAIL: admin@localhost
      SEMAPHORE_ADMIN: admin
      SEMAPHORE_WEB_ROOT: http://192.168.185.10:3000
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    depends_on:
      - mysql

This gave me all of the key things i needed to include on the podman runs. This creates a podman pod which includes a pod , a 

#!/bin/bash
podman pod create --name ansible -p 3306:3306 -p 3000:3000

podman run -d --name=mariadb --pod ansible -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=my-secret-pw -e MYSQL_DATABASE=semaphore -e MYSQL_USER=semaphore -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=semaphore -v /opt/data/mysql/:/var/lib/mysql mariadb:10

podman run -d --name=semaphore --pod ansible -e SEMAPHORE_DB_USER=semaphore -e SEMAPHORE_DB_PASS=semaphore -e SEMAPHORE_DB_HOST=127.0.0.1 -e SEMAPHORE_DB_PORT=3306 -e SEMAPHORE_DB=semaphore -e SEMAPHORE_PLAYBOOK_PATH=/etc/semaphore -e SEMAPHORE_ADMIN_PASSWORD=password -e SEMAPHORE_ADMIN_NAME="Developer" -e SEMAPHORE_ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@localhost -e SEMAPHORE_ADMIN=admin -e SEMAPHORE_WEB_ROOT=http://172.30.10.120:3000 -v /opt/data/semaphore/:/opt/data/semaphore ansiblesemaphore/semaphore

Once this is in place a pod can be created 

[root@awxncentos7 ansible-semaphore]# ./ansible-pod.sh 
6228b13cc516489f1fefc15ab7df2ae7525fe10e331a89d762a7e27fb17f5abf
2f6a335a451549fbeb3ec6859adb779f1eb3d7b40c662fc46b7b1200a06fc54e
1eb5c45688098dfcaf3539024dc566fb23ddfe3f5b27a9c8541c5dd19563b0b4
[root@awxncentos7 ansible-semaphore]#

see below the ansible pod 

[root@awxncentos7 ansible-semaphore]# podman pod ls
POD ID         NAME      STATUS    CREATED          # OF CONTAINERS   INFRA ID
6228b13cc516   ansible   Running   59 seconds ago   3                 291de768890d
b5cdb5ff2e13   zorc      Running   7 days ago       6                 69ae2e5c6ce9
[root@awxncentos7 ansible-semaphore]#

And here are the containers running

CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                                                                     COMMAND               CREATED        STATUS            PORTS                                           NAMES
1eb5c4568809  docker.io/ansiblesemaphore/semaphore:latest                                               /usr/local/bin/se...  3 minutes ago  Up 3 minutes ago  0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp                          semaphore
2f6a335a4515  docker.io/library/mariadb:10                                                              mysqld                3 minutes ago  Up 3 minutes ago  0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp                          mariadb
fad84eae5061  docker.io/gogs/gogs:latest                                                                /bin/s6-svscan /a...  3 hours ago    Up 3 hours ago    0.0.0.0:10022->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:10080->3000/tcp  gogs

you can read the log for the semaphore container to get a summary of the running config. 

[root@awxncentos7 ansible-semaphore]# podman logs --tail 5 semaphore 
Server is running
Checking DB migrations
Tmp Path (projects home) /tmp/semaphore
MySQL semaphore@127.0.0.1:3306 semaphore
Port :3000
[root@awxncentos7 ansible-semaphore]#

Once this is up and running you can go ahead and try set up semaphore as normal.

By Tony Lokko