Here Comes the Swarm 03

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:30:00 +0000

We’ve got our VMs running. Now it’s time to turn them into something useful. That’s where Ansible comes in—my trusty configuration management tool that does all the heavy lifting.

The Ansible Setup #

The playbooks live in ansible/. I use a few external roles (thank you, Galaxy) plus some custom roles I wrote myself:

geerlingguy.docker - installs Docker (because why reinvent the wheel)
geerlingguy.pip - Python dependencies
fresh_install - my custom role for base system configuration
docker_swarm - initializes the Swarm cluster
portainer - deploys the management UI
github_runner - sets up self-hosted GitHub Actions runners

Inventory: Knowing Your Nodes #

Here’s how Ansible sees my cluster:

Configuration on My devblog

Here Comes the Swarm 03

The Ansible Setup #

Inventory: Knowing Your Nodes #