Downloading artifacts from a Maven repository with Ansible

AnsibleLogoAn example of downloading artifacts from a Maven repository using Ansible, including a prebuilt Docker image.

Prerequisites

Install JDK and Maven using existing Ansible modules

ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.java
ansible-galaxy install https://github.com/silpion/ansible-maven.git
- hosts: localhost

 roles:
 - { role: ansible-maven }
 - { role: geerlingguy.java }

 vars:
 java_packages:
 - java-1.7.0-openjdk

Example

From mvn.yml, download any number of Maven artifacts optionally from different repositories

- hosts: localhost

 vars:
 mvn_artifacts:
 - id: org.apache.maven:maven-core:2.2.1:jar:sources
 dest: /tmp/test.jar
 # params: -U # update snapshots
 # repos:
 # - http://repo1.maven.apache.org/maven2
 
 tasks:
 - name: copy maven artifacts
 command: mvn {{ item.params | default('') }} org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:get -Dartifact={{ item.id }} -Ddest={{ item.dest }} -Dtransitive=false -Pansible-maven -DremoteRepositories={{ item.repos | default(['http://repo1.maven.apache.org/maven2']) | join(",") }}
 with_items: mvn_artifacts

Docker

An image with Ansible, JDK and Maven preinstalled is available at csanchez/ansible-maven.

Scaling Docker with Kubernetes

kubernetesI have published a new article on InfoQ, Scaling Docker with Kubernetes, where I describe the Kubernetes project and how it allows to run Docker containers across multiple hosts.

Kubernetes is an open source project to manage a cluster of Linux containers as a single system, managing and running Docker containers across multiple hosts, offering co-location of containers, service discovery and replication control.

Included in the article there is an example of scaling Jenkins in a master – multiple slaves architecture, where the slaves are running in Kubernetes. When I finally find the time I will implement a Jenkins Kubernetes plugin that would handle the scaling automatically.