Book Image

Learn Ansible

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Learn Ansible

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

The Ansible playbook debugger

Ansible has a debugger built in. Let's take a look at how you can build this into your playbook by creating a simple playbook with an error. As we have just mentioned it, we are going to write a playbook that uses the say module. The playbook itself looks as follows:

---

- hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
debugger: "on_failed"

vars:
message: "The task has completed and all is well"
voice: "Daniel"

tasks:
- name: Say a message on your Ansible host
say:
msg: "{{ massage }}"
voice: "{{ voice }}"

There are two things to point out: the first being the mistake. As you can see, we are defining a variable named message, but when we come to use it the task, I have made a typo and entered massage instead. Luckily, as I am developing the playbook, I have instructed Ansible...