Ansible AWX on minikube macOS

We are running ...

• macOS Monterey 12.6
• on M1 Max chip with 64GB memory
• with Docker Desktop 4.11.1
• minikube 1.26.1

This document is based on Heikki Koivisto's "Install AWX on mac" YouTube video. I ran into a few gotchas, so I decided to put up these notes. One notable difference is that Heikki uses the hyperkit driver, whereas I am using docker. As of this writing, hyperkit does not have M1 support.

Start suitably-sized cluster

By default, minikube is using the docker driver. Ensure your docker is configured with enough resources to satisfy the minikube start options.

$ minikube start --addons=ingress --cpus=4 --memory=8g

Check that we have stuff

$ kubectl get pods -A

Stand up AWX using awx-operator

Clone operator, and checkout release 0.18.0. I initially tried to use 0.28 and 0.29, but couldn't get either one to stand up. 0.18.0 did work. This was an exercise to learn AWX, not how to debug its installation. So 0.18 it is.

$ git clone git@github.com:ansible/awx-operator.git
$ cd awx-operator/
$ git checkout 0.18.0
$ export NAMESPACE=awx
$ make deploy
$ kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=${NAMESPACE}

Edit awx-demo.yml. It should be changed to:

---
apiVersion: awx.ansible.com/v1beta1
kind: AWX
metadata:
  name: awx

Apply the resource

$ kubectl apply -f awx-demo.yml

Tail Logs It can take a little time to get everything up and running. May as well follow the logs for a bit.

$ kubectl logs -f deployments/awx-operator-controller-manager -c awx-manager

---

AWX Username/ Password

The username is admin and password is obtained from the k8s secrets:

$ kubectl get secret awx-admin-password -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 --decode

Launch Console (one-liner)

This command sets up the tunnel, gets the URL, and opens the browser to AWX login page.

$ minikube service awx-service -n ${NAMESPACE} 

Output will be something like this:

|-----------|-------------|-------------|--------------|
| NAMESPACE |    NAME     | TARGET PORT |    URL       |
|-----------|-------------|-------------|--------------|
| awx       | awx-service |             |No node port  |
|-----------|-------------|-------------|--------------|
😿service awx/awx-service has no node port
🏃Starting tunnel for service awx-service.
|-----------|-------------|-------------|------------------------|
| NAMESPACE |NAME         | TARGET PORT |          URL           |
|-----------|-------------|-------------|------------------------|
| awx       | awx-service |             | http://127.0.0.1:56500 |
|-----------|-------------|-------------|------------------------|
🎉Opening service awx/awx-service in default browser...
❗Because you are using a Docker driver on darwin, the terminal needs to be open to run it.

---

Launch Console (as from original video)

These instructions are from the original video.

Open minikube tunnel to the service:

$ minikube tunnel awx-service

Output will be something like this:

✅  Tunnel successfully started
📌  NOTE: Please do not close this terminal as this process must stay alive for the tunnel to be accessible ...

Open a new terminal, and get the URL

$ minikube service awx-service --url -n ${NAMESPACE}

Output will be something like this:

😿service awx/awx-service has no node port
http://127.0.0.1:52284
❗Because you are using a Docker driver on darwin, the terminal needs to be open to run it.

Visit the URL reported by the command.