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

Creating the Ansible user

When you create a machine (or rent one from any hosting company), it arrives with only the root user, or other users such as vagrant. Let's start creating a playbook that ensures that an Ansible user is created, it's accessible with an SSH key, and is able to perform actions on behalf of other users (sudo) with no password required. We often call this playbook firstrun.yaml, since we execute it as soon as a new machine is created, but after that, we don't use it, since we disable the default user for security reasons. Our script will look something like the following:

--- 
- hosts: all
user: vagrant
tasks:
- name: Ensure ansible user exists
user:
name: ansible
state: present
comment: Ansible
become: True
- name: Ensure ansible user accepts the SSH key
authorized_key:
user: ansible...