Skip to content

Tower Integration

The tower plugin adds the ability to register a machine with AWX / Tower, delete a machine from AWX / Tower, and invoke job templates against a machine.

The plugin provides stages and tasks to help facilitate these actions.

The plugin is a RackN license plugin and your DRP license will need to have the tower plugin enabled.

Setup

To use this plugin, load the plugin_provider into the DRP endpoint. Once loaded, create a plugin with the tower/url, tower/login, and tower/password parameters. These will be used to connect to the AWX / Tower system.

Operations

There are three operations that can be done through the stages/tasks. These can be sequenced by workflows to have the desired staging.

tower-register

The tower-register stage registers the host with AWX / Tower. The machine will need the required tower/inventory parameter. This parameter defines the inventory the host should be created in.

Additionally, the tower/group parameter can be added to place the host into the inventory sub-group.

As part of the registeration, additional ssh-keys can be put in place to allow AWX / Tower to access the system. The following parameters enable these keys:

  • tower/ssh-keys - A map of keys to add to the system.
  • tower/ssh-keys-path - The file to put the keys in.
  • tower/ssh-keys-path-userid - The userid to use for the ssh key file.
  • tower/ssh-keys-path-groupid - The groupid to use for the ssh key file.

tower-delete

The tower-delete stage deletes the host from AWX / Tower.

If AWX / Tower returns a 409 Conflict because one or more jobs are actively running against the host, the plugin automatically cancels those jobs, waits briefly for the cancellations to propagate, and retries the deletion. This makes tower-delete safe to call during decommission workflows without manually cancelling in-flight jobs first.

tower-invoke

The tower-invoke stage runs a job template on the host from AWX / Tower.

The following parameters can be specifed to alter the behavior.

  • tower/job-template - Required string parameter that specifies the job template to execute.
  • tower/job-timeout - Numeric parameter that specifies the number of seconds to wait for the job to complete.
  • tower/extra-var - A Map of values to add to the machine during the job execution.

The task will block until the job is complete, errors, or times out. All the results are reflected into the job log for that task.

tower-invoke-curl

The tower-invoke-curl stage performs a direct curl-based HTTP POST to a configured AWX / Tower API endpoint without using the Tower plugin client.

The following parameters can be specified to alter the behavior.

  • tower/bearer-token - If set, used as Authorization: Bearer token (overrides login/password).
  • tower/content-type - HTTP Content-Type header (default: application/json).
  • tower/extra-vars - JSON object passed as the POST body.
  • tower/output-to-inventory - List of JSON response fields to store as inventory/tower/<field> params.

TLS Certificate Verification

By default the plugin validates the TLS certificate presented by the AWX / Tower server. In environments that use self-signed or internally-signed certificates that are not trusted by the DRP host, set the optional plugin parameter tower/skip-tls-verify to true to disable certificate validation.

Security note: disabling certificate verification exposes the connection to man-in-the-middle attacks. Use only when a properly-signed certificate or a trusted internal CA cannot be configured, and restrict network access to AWX / Tower accordingly.