You have already learned how Tower separates credentials from users. Another advantage of Ansible Tower is the user and group rights management.
There are three types of Tower Users:
Normal User: Have read and write access limited to the inventory and projects for which that user has been granted the appropriate roles and privileges.
System Auditor: Auditors implicitly inherit the read-only capability for all objects within the Tower environment.
System Administrator: Has admin, read, and write privileges over the entire Tower installation.
Let’s create a user:
In the Tower menu under ACCESS click Users
Click the green plus button
Fill in the values for the new user:
FIRST NAME: Werner
LAST NAME: Web
EMAIL: wweb@example.com
USERNAME: wweb
PASSWORD: ansible
Confirm password
USER TYPE: Normal User
Click SAVE
A Team is a subdivision of an organization with associated users, projects, credentials, and permissions. Teams provide a means to implement role-based access control schemes and delegate responsibilities across organizations. For instance, permissions may be granted to a whole Team rather than each user on the Team.
Create a Team:
In the menu go to ACCESS → Teams
Click the green plus button and create a team named Web Content.
Click SAVE
Now you can add a user to the Team:
Switch to the Users view of the Web Content Team by clicking the USERS button.
Click the green plus button, check the box next to the wweb user and click SAVE.
Now click the PERMISSIONS button in the TEAMS view, you will be greeted with “No Permissions Have Been Granted”.
Permissions allow to read, modify, and administer projects, inventories, and other Tower elements. Permissions can be set for different resources.
To allow users or teams to actually do something, you have to set permissions. The user wweb should only be allowed to modify content of the assigned webservers.
Add the permission to use the template:
In the Permissions view of the Team Web Content click the green plus button to add permissions.
A new window opens. You can choose to set permissions for a number of resources.
Select the resource type JOB TEMPLATES
Choose the Create index.html Template by checking the box next to it.
The second part of the window opens, here you assign roles to the selected resource.
Click SAVE
Now log out of Tower’s web UI and in again as the wweb user.
Go to the Templates view, you should notice for wweb only the Create index.html template is listed. He is allowed to view and launch, but not to edit the Template. Just open the template and try to change it.
Run the Job Template by clicking the rocket icon. Enter the survey content to your liking and launch the job.
In the following Jobs view have a good look around, note that there where changes to the host (of course…).
Check the result: In the code-server terminal execute curl to pull the content of the webserver on node1 (you could of course check node2, too):
[student@ansible-1 ~]$ curl http://node1
Just recall what you have just done: You enabled a restricted user to run an Ansible Playbook
Without having access to the credentials
Without being able to change the Playbook itself
But with the ability to change variables you predefined!
Effectively you provided the power to execute automation to another user without handing out your credentials or giving the user the ability to change the automation code. And yet, at the same time the user can still modify things based on the surveys you created.
This capability is one of the main strengths of Ansible Tower!