Automating Notifications with Ansible: Email, WhatsApp, and SMS

In today’s interconnected world, effective communication is key. As a DevOps engineer or system administrator, you often need to send notifications about system status, deployment results, or critical alerts. Ansible, a powerful automation tool, can help streamline this process. In this blog post, we’ll create an Ansible playbook that sends notifications via email, WhatsApp, and SMS.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have:

1. Ansible installed on your control node
2. Access to an SMTP server for sending emails
3. A Twilio account for sending SMS and WhatsApp messages
4. Python requests library installed for WhatsApp integration

The Playbook Structure

We’ll create a playbook named send_notifications.yml with the following structure:

---
- name: Send Notifications
  hosts: localhost
  vars_files:
    - vars/credentials.yml
  tasks:
    - name: Send Email Notification
      # Email task here
- name: Send SMS Notification
      # SMS task here
    - name: Send WhatsApp Notification
      # WhatsApp task here

Sending Email Notifications

For sending emails, we’ll use Ansible’s built-in mail module:

- name: Send Email Notification
  mail:
    host: smtp.gmail.com
    port: 587
    username: "{{ email_username }}"
    password: "{{ email_password }}"
    to: recipient@example.com
    subject: "Ansible Notification"
    body: "This is a test email sent from Ansible."
  delegate_to: localhost

Sending SMS Notifications

For SMS, we’ll use the Twilio module:

- name: Send SMS Notification
  twilio:
    account_sid: "{{ twilio_account_sid }}"
    auth_token: "{{ twilio_auth_token }}"
    from_number: "{{ twilio_phone_number }}"
    to_number: "+1234567890"
    msg: "This is a test SMS sent from Ansible."

Sending WhatsApp Notifications

Ansible doesn’t have a built-in module for WhatsApp, so we’ll use the uri module to interact with the Twilio API:

- name: Send WhatsApp Notification
  uri:
    url: "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/{{ twilio_account_sid }}/Messages.json"
    method: POST
    user: "{{ twilio_account_sid }}"
    password: "{{ twilio_auth_token }}"
    body_format: form-urlencoded
    body:
      From: "whatsapp:{{ twilio_whatsapp_number }}"
      To: "whatsapp:+1234567890"
      Body: "This is a test WhatsApp message sent from Ansible."
    status_code: 201
  register: whatsapp_response

Securing Credentials

To keep our credentials secure, we’ll store them in a separate file vars/credentials.yml:

email_username: your_email@gmail.com
email_password: your_email_password
twilio_account_sid: your_twilio_account_sid
twilio_auth_token: your_twilio_auth_token
twilio_phone_number: your_twilio_phone_number
twilio_whatsapp_number: your_twilio_whatsapp_number

Make sure to encrypt this file using ansible-vault:

ansible-vault encrypt vars/credentials.yml

Running the Playbook

To run the playbook:

ansible-playbook send_notifications.yml --ask-vault-pass

Conclusion

With this Ansible playbook, you can now easily send notifications across multiple channels. This can be incredibly useful for:

1. Alerting on system failures or critical events
2. Notifying team members about deployment status
3. Sending regular reports or updates

Remember to customize the message content and recipient details based on your specific use case. You can also extend this playbook to include conditions, so notifications are only sent when certain criteria are met.By leveraging Ansible’s automation capabilities, you’ve created a powerful, multi-channel notification system that can be easily integrated into your existing workflows and playbooks.

So, whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a professional, or just someone who wants to learn more, I invite you to follow me on this journey. Subscribe to my blog and follow me on social media to stay in the loop and never miss a post.

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