Let’s see how to add PPA using Ansible in this article. Bobcares, as a part of our Server Management Services offers solutions to every query that comes our way.

Add PPAs With Ansible

Ansible is a software toolset that allows for infrastructure as code. The suite is open-source and offers software provisioning, configuration management, and also application deployment capabilities. It is an agentless configuration management solution that also assists operations teams in managing server installation, patching, and command execution.

In this article, we’ll see how to use Ansible to add a PPA (Personal Package Archive).

How to add PPAs with Ansible on Ubuntu?

1. Firstly, create a new playbook add_ppa.yaml.

   $ nano playbooks/add_ppa.yaml
2. Then enter the following lines in the add_ppa.yaml playbook:

   - hosts: all

   user: ansible

   become: True

   tasks:

   – name: Add Node.js 10.19 PPA

   apt_repository:

   repo: ppa:osomon/nodejs-10.19-focal

   state: present

   update_cache: True

   validate_certs: False
3. After that, by pressing <Ctrl> + X, followed by Y and <Enter> , we can save the add_ppa.yaml playbook.

   Here, the repo option of the apt_repository module adds the PPA osomon/nodejs-10.19-focal. Be sure to add ppa: before the PPA name, i.e. ppa:osomon/nodejs-10.19-focal. Most of the PPAs use self-signed certificates, so Ansible cannot verify them for users, so they may show error when we run the playbook.

   So we can set validate_certs to False to skip certificate validation for the PPA we are adding. We can also set validate_certs to False to skip certification validation when adding third-party package repositories.
4. Now run the add_ppa.yaml playbook.

   $ ansible-playbook playbooks/add_ppa.yaml
5. This creates a new .list file for the PPA osomon/nodejs-10.19-focal in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory.

   $ tree /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
6. By looking at the contents of the ppa_osomon_nodejs_10_19_focal_focal.list file, we can obviously confirm that the PPA has been added.

   $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ppa_osomon_nodejs_10_19_focal_xenial.list

Here, we added the osomon/nodejs-10.19-focal Node.js 10.19 PPA for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS successfully.

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Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the steps provided by our Tech team to add PPA using Ansible in Ubuntu.