Table Of Contents

Introduction

The Hetzner Cloud provides an API that lets you manage your servers in an automated way. In this tutorial I will use the API to:

  1. Get the server IDs for all servers provisioned from my Ansible host inventory with their hostname.
  2. Use these server IDs to create automated snapshots or backups for the corresponding systems with custom descriptions and labels.
  3. Check the snapshot/backup creation progress against the image ID and action ID I received in step 2

You can for example add the hcloud_token variable and the block of tasks to the ansible playbook in my tutorial for running system updates with an automated downtime in CheckMK.

Instructions

Create an API Token

Before you can use the API you need to create an API Token for your project in the Hetzner Cloud. For this select your project, change to the “Security” section on the left pane and under “Api-Token” add a new token with read and write permission. Store the key somewhere save as you can only see it once.

The Ansible Playbook

This is my example ansible playbook that I use all the time. You can change some things to your liking:

  • Add your API token in the vars section
  • In the body section of the task Create system snapshot you can:
    • change the description/name of the backup
    • set/add labels
    • choose between the two image types backup and snapshot.
  • In the task Wait until snapshot is finished you can change the retries and delay (in seconds) between each try in the loop

For further informations check the Hetzner Cloud API Docs.

---
- name: "Create backup of server"
  hosts: '{{ target }}'
  vars:
          hcloud_token: YOUR_API_TOKEN_HERE
  tasks:
    - block:
      - name: Get server ID from Hetzner API
        delegate_to: localhost
        register: response
        uri:
          url: "https://api.hetzner.cloud/v1/servers?name={{ inventory_hostname }}"
          method: GET
          headers:
            Authorization: "Bearer {{ hcloud_token }}"
          return_content: yes
          status_code: 200
          body_format: json

      - name: Create system backup
        delegate_to: localhost
        register: response
        uri:
          url: "https://api.hetzner.cloud/v1/servers/{{ response.json.servers[0].id }}/actions/create_image"
          method: POST
          headers:
            Authorization: "Bearer {{ hcloud_token }}"
            Content-Type: "application/json"
          body: '{"description":"Backup before update installation with ansible","labels":{"author":"ansible"},"type":"backup"}'
          return_content: yes
          status_code: 201
          body_format: json

      - name: Wait until backup is finished
        delegate_to: localhost
        register: response
        uri:
          url: "https://api.hetzner.cloud/v1/images/{{ response.json.image.id }}/actions/{{ response.json.action.id }}"
          method: GET
          headers:
            Authorization: "Bearer {{ hcloud_token }}"
          return_content: yes
          status_code: 200
          body_format: json
        until: response.json.action.progress == 100
        retries: 30
        delay: 10