How to Install Ansible AWX on Kubernetes Cluster

In this post, we will show you how to install Ansible AWX on Kubernetes (k8s) cluster step by step.

Ansible AWX is a powerful open-source tool for managing and automating IT infrastructure. AWX provides a graphical user interface for Ansible, allowing you to easily create, schedule, and run Ansible playbooks.

Kubernetes, on the other hand, is a popular container orchestration platform that is widely used for deploying and managing containerized applications.

Prerequisites

  • Kubernetes cluster
  • Kubectl
  • A regular user with sudo rights and cluster admin rights
  • Internet connectivity

Step :1 Install helm

In case you, helm is installed on your system then run beneath commands to install,

$ curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3
$ chmod +x get_helm.sh
$ ./get_helm.sh
$ helm version

Install-helm-linux-command-line

Step 2: Install the AWX chart

The easiest way to install AWX on Kubernetes is by using the AWX Helm chart. So, to install AWX via chart, first add its repository using following helm command.

$ helm repo add awx-operator https://ansible.github.io/awx-operator/
"awx-operator" has been added to your repositories
$

Note: If you had already added this repository before, then run beneath command to get latest version of packages.

$ helm repo update

To install awx-operator via chart, run

$ helm install ansible-awx-operator awx-operator/awx-operator -n awx --create-namespace

helm-install-awx-operator-kubernetes

This will download the AWX chart and install it on your Kubernetes cluster in awx namespace.The installation process may take a few minutes, so be patient.

Step 3: Verify AWX operator installation

After the successful installation, you can verify AWX operator status by running below command

$ sudo kubectl get pods -n awx

You should see something like this:

awx-operator-pod-status-kubectl

Step:4 Create PV, PVC and deploy AWX yaml file

AWX requires persistent volume for postgres pod. So, let’s first create a storage class for local volume

Note: In this post, I am using local file system as persistent volume.

$ vi local-storage-class.yaml
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: local-storage
  namespace: awx
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer

Save and close the file and then run ,

$ kubectl create -f local-storage-class.yaml
$ kubectl get sc -n awx
NAME            PROVISIONER                    RECLAIMPOLICY   VOLUMEBINDINGMODE      ALLOWVOLUMEEXPANSION   
local-storage   kubernetes.io/no-provisioner   Delete          WaitForFirstConsumer   false                 
$

Next create persistent volume(pv) using following pv.yaml file,

$ vi pv.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: postgres-pv
  namespace: awx
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 10Gi
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Delete
  storageClassName: local-storage
  local:
    path: /mnt/storage
  nodeAffinity:
    required:
      nodeSelectorTerms:
      - matchExpressions:
        - key: kubernetes.io/hostname
          operator: In
          values:
          - k8s-worker

Save & exit the file.

Postgres-pv-awx-kubernetes

Important note : Make sure folder “/mnt/storage” exists on worker node, if it does not exist then create it using mkdir command on worker node. In our case worker node is “k8s-worker”

Execute the beneath command to create postgres-pv in awx namespace.

$ kubectl create -f pv.yaml

Once pv is created successfully then create persistentvolumecliam using pvc.yaml file,

$ vi  pvc.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: postgres-13-ansible-awx-postgres-13-0
  namespace: awx
spec:
  storageClassName: local-storage
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

posgres-pvc-awx-kubernetes

To create pvc, run following kubectl command

$ kubectl create -f pvc.yaml

Verify the status of pv and pvc using beneath command

$ kubectl get pv,pvc -n awx

Now, we are all set to deploy AWX instance. Create an ansible-awx.yaml file with following content

$ vi ansible-awx.yaml
---
apiVersion: awx.ansible.com/v1beta1
kind: AWX
metadata:
  name: ansible-awx
  namespace: awx
spec:
  service_type: nodeport
  postgres_storage_class: local-storage

Ansible-awx-yaml-file

save and close the file.

Execute following kubectl command to deploy awx instance,

$ kubectl create -f ansible-awx.yaml

Wait for couple of minutes and then check pods status in awx namespace.

$ kubectl get pods -n awx

Ansible-AWX-Pods-Status-Kubernetes

Step 5: Access AWX Web Interface

To access the AWX web interface, you need to create a service that exposes the awx-web deployment:

$ kubectl expose deployment ansible-awx-web --name ansible-awx-web-svc --type NodePort -n awx

This command will create a NodePort service that maps the AWX web container’s port to a port on the Kubernetes node. You can find the port number by running:

$ kubectl get svc ansible-awx-web-svc  -n awx

This will output something like this:

NAME                 TYPE       CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
ansible-awx-web-svc   NodePort   10.99.83.248   <none>        8052:32254/TCP   82s

In this example, the web service is available on port 32254.

Expose-Ansible-AWX-Web-NodePort-Kubernetes

By default, the admin user is admin for web interface and the password is available in the <resourcename>-admin-password secret. To retrieve the admin password, run

$ kubectl get secrets -n awx | grep -i admin-password
ansible-awx-admin-password        Opaque               1      109m
$
$ kubectl get secret ansible-awx-admin-password -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" -n awx | base64 --decode ; echo
l9mWcIOXQhSKnzZQyQQ9LZf3awDV0YMJ
$

You can now access the AWX web interface by opening a web browser and navigating to `http://<node-ip>:<node-port>/`. In the example above, the URL would be

http://192.168.1.223:3225

AWX-Login-URL-Kubernetes

Click on Log In after entering the credentials.

Ansible-AWX-Web-Dashboard

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Ansible AWX on Kubernetes. You can now use AWX to automate your IT infrastructure and make your life as a sysadmin easier.

23 thoughts on “How to Install Ansible AWX on Kubernetes Cluster”

  1. I have been exploring ansible solutions to create all AWX-related config via ansible, like inventory, jobs, etc. Is there a way to do this via the helm chart, so I can configure this at startup? I have left-over ansible tasks that create all of this, but I was hoping there’s a more “kubernetes”-way to do this (i.e. config via helm chart specs)…

  2. Hi,
    Thank you for the excellent guide!

    When I deploy AWX instance ansible-aws-task and ansible-aws-web getting failed and status is “CrashLoopBackoff”

    ambi@kube-master:~/awx$ kubectl get pods -n awx
    NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
    ansible-awx-postgres-13-0 1/1 Running 0 2m39s
    ansible-awx-task-8567b4d6d5-htrz8 0/4 Init:CrashLoopBackOff 4 (39s ago) 2m18s
    ansible-awx-web-6766ddb5c8-8xk25 1/3 CrashLoopBackOff 2 (13s ago) 16s
    awx-operator-controller-manager-6569d67f4c-nqtmh 2/2 Running 0 114m
    ambi@kube-master:~/awx$

    —————–
    describe pod shows following logs

    Events:
    Type Reason Age From Message
    —- —— —- —- ——-
    Normal Scheduled 99s default-scheduler Successfully assigned awx/ansible-awx-task-8567b4d6d5-htrz8 to kube-worker
    Normal Pulled 2s (x5 over 99s) kubelet Container image “quay.io/ansible/awx-ee:latest” already present on machine
    Normal Created 2s (x5 over 99s) kubelet Created container init
    Normal Started 1s (x5 over 99s) kubelet Started container init
    Warning BackOff 1s (x9 over 97s) kubelet Back-off restarting failed container init in pod ansible-awx-task-8567b4d6d5-htrz8_awx(a0c528db-ec4a-4ced-9dca-9bd3004fa782)
    ==================
    Cannot really find what’s going on in the logs

    le-awx”,”namespace”:”awx”,”error”:”exit status 2″,”stacktrace”:”github.com/operator-framework/ansible-operator-plugins/internal/ansible/runner.(*runner).Run.func1\n\tansible-operator-plugins/internal/ansible/runner/runner.go:269″}
    {“level”:”error”,”ts”:”2024-01-03T14:07:45Z”,”msg”:”Reconciler error”,”controller”:”awx-controller”,”object”:{“name”:”ansible-awx”,”namespace”:”awx”},”namespace”:”awx”,”name”:”ansible-awx”,”reconcileID”:”e9b8d090-4f0d-444c-91d0-4f3528f5e6e3″,”error”:”event runner on failed”,”stacktrace”:”sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/pkg/internal/controller.(*Controller).reconcileHandler\n\t/home/runner/go/pkg/mod/sigs.k8s.io/[email protected]/pkg/internal/controller/controller.go:329\nsigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/pkg/internal/controller.(*Controller).processNextWorkItem\n\t/home/runner/go/pkg/mod/sigs.k8s.io/[email protected]/pkg/internal/controller/controller.go:274\nsigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/pkg/internal/controller.(*Controller).Start.func2.2\n\t/home/runner/go/pkg/mod/sigs.k8s.io/[email protected]/pkg/internal/controller/controller.go:235″}
    =================
    Could anyone please help me, Thank You!

  3. I was able to go through all the steps but i mm getting an error on my ansible-awx-web pod. It gives a status of CrashLoopBackOff and when i look at the logs the error says psycopg.OperationalError: connection failed: password authentication failed for user “awx”
    How can I fix my yaml to solve this error?

  4. After running this step
    $ kubectl create -f ansible-awx.yaml
    i get errror when create container” Warning FailedMount 6s (x7 over 37s) kubelet MountVolume.NewMounter initialization failed for volume “postgres-pv” : path “/mnt/storage” does not exist”
    How can I fix my yaml to solve this error?

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