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)

Inbuilt commands

When we installed Ansible, there were several different commands installed. These were:

  • ansible
  • ansible-config
  • ansible-console
  • ansible-doc
  • ansible-inventory
  • ansible-vault

We will be covering a few of the commands, such as ansible-galaxy, ansible-playbook, and ansible-pull, in later chapters, so I will not go into any detail about those commands in this chapter. Let's make a start at the top of the list with a command we have already used.

Ansible

Now, you would have thought that ansible is going to be the most common command we will be using throughout this book, but it isn't.

The ansible command is really only ever used for running ad hoc commands again in a single or collection of hosts. In the...