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You're reading from Security Automation with Ansible 2 Leverage Ansible 2 to automate complex security tasks like application security, network security, and malware analysis

Product type Paperback

Published in Dec 2017

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781788394512

Length 364 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Ansible

Concepts

Application Security

Authors (2):

Akash Mahajan

MADHU AKULA

View More author details

Table of Contents (12) Chapters

Preface

1. Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles FREE CHAPTER

2. Ansible Tower, Jenkins, and Other Automation Tools

3. Setting Up a Hardened WordPress with Encrypted Automated Backups

4. Log Monitoring and Serverless Automated Defense (Elastic Stack in AWS)

5. Automating Web Application Security Testing Using OWASP ZAP

6. Vulnerability Scanning with Nessus

7. Security Hardening for Applications and Networks

8. Continuous Security Scanning for Docker Containers

9. Automating Lab Setups for Forensics Collection and Malware Analysis

10. Writing an Ansible Module for Security Testing

11. Ansible Security Best Practices, References, and Further Reading

A complete WordPress installation step-by-step

In this section, we will go ahead and do a complete setup of WordPress, the required database server, hardening, and backup. Our platform of choice is Linux (Ubuntu 16.04) with nginx web server and with PHP-FPM for PHP runtime. We will use duply to set up the backups which will get stored in AWS S3.

Setting up nginx web server

Setting up nginx is as simple as sudo apt-get install nginx, but configuring for our use case and managing the configuration's automated way is where Ansible gives the power. Let's look at the following snippet of nginx's role from the playbook:

- name: adding nginx signing key
  apt_key:
    url: http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key
    state: present

- name: adding sources.list deb url for nginx
  lineinfile:
    dest: /etc/apt/sources.list
    line: "deb http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ trusty nginx"

- name: update the cache and install nginx server
  apt:
    name: nginx
    update_cache: yes
    state...