Book Image

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

By : Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

By: Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With the release of Ansible 2.7, even complex tasks can be handled much more easily than before. Learning Ansible 2.7 will help you take your first steps toward understanding the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible by introducing you to topics such as playbooks, modules, and the installation of Linux, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Windows support. In addition to this, you will focus on various testing strategies, deployment, and orchestration to build on your knowledge. The book will then help you get accustomed to features including cleaner architecture, task blocks, and playbook parsing, which can help you to streamline automation processes. Next, you will learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) before gaining insights into the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. This will help you to use Ansible to interact with different operating systems and improve your working efficiency. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the Ansible skills you need to automate complex tasks for your organization.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Creating a Web Server Using Ansible
4
Section 2: Deploying Playbooks in a Production Environment
9
Section 3: Deploying an Application with Ansible
13
Section 4: Deploying an Application with Ansible

The check mode

The check mode (also known as the dry-run or no-op mode) will run your playbook in a no-operation mode—that is, it will not apply any changes to the remote host; instead, it will just show the changes that will be introduced when a task is run. Whether the check mode is actually enabled or not depends on each module. There are few commands that you may find interesting. All of these commands will have to be run in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/modules, or where your Ansible module folder is (different paths could be possible based on the operating system you are using as well as the way you installed Ansible).

To count the number of available modules on your installation, you can perform this command:

find . -type f | grep '.py$' | grep -v '__init__' | wc -l  

With Ansible 2.7.2, the result of this command is 2095, since Ansible...