This is a rough skeleton of the ansible used to deploy RISELab/Apache Spark Jenkins build workers on Ubuntu 20LTS.

WARNING: this will not work "directly out of the box" and will need to be tweaked to work on any ubuntu servers you might want to try this on.

all of the configs for the workers live in roles/common/... and roles/jenkins-worker...

• fresh install of ubuntu 20
• a service account w/sudo
• python 3, ansible, ansible-playbook installed locally
• add hostname(s) to the hosts file
• add this to your ~/.ansible.cfg: [defaults] host_key_checking = False

ansible-playbook -u <service account> deploy-jenkins-worker.yml -i <ansible-style-hosts-file> -k -b -K

tips:

• if you are installing more than a few workers, it's best to run the playbook on smaller (2-3) batches at a time. this way it's easier to track down errors, as ansible is very noisy.
• when you encounter an error, you should comment out any previously-run plays and tasks. this saves time when debugging, and let's you easily track where you are in the process.
• apt-get remove <application_name> and apt-get purge <package-name> are your friends