Book Image

Practical Ansible 2

By : Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

Practical Ansible 2

By: Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Ansible enables you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application roll-outs, and can be used as a deployment and orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime. In this book, you'll work with Ansible 2.9 and learn to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You'll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and get to grips with concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and network modules. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. In addition to this, you'll also understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be well - versed in writing playbooks and other related Ansible code to overcome just about all of your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-code provisioning to application deployments, and even handling the mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks that take up so much valuable time.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
6
Section 2: Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
11
Section 3: Using Ansible in an Enterprise

Finding included plugins

As we discussed in the preceding section, plugins are not as apparent in Ansible as their module counterparts are, and yet we have been using them behind the scenes in every single Ansible command we've issued so far! Let's build on our work in the previous section, where we looked at the plugin documentation by looking at where we can find the source code for the plugins. This, in turn, will serve as a precursor to us building a simple plugin of our own.

If you installed Ansible on a Linux system using a package manager (that is, via an RPM or DEB package), then the location of your plugins will depend on your OS. For example, on my test CentOS 7 system where I installed Ansible from the official RPM package, I can see the plugins installed here:

$ ls /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/plugins/
action cliconf httpapi inventory...