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

Working with conditionals

Until now, we have only seen how playbooks work and how tasks are executed. We have also seen that Ansible executes all of these tasks sequentially. However, this would not help you while writing an advanced playbook that contains tens of tasks and have to execute only a subset of these tasks. For example, let's say you have a playbook that will install Apache HTTPd server on the remote host. Now, the Apache HTTPd server has a different package name for a Debian-based operating system, and it's called apache2; for a Red Hat-based operating system, it's called httpd.

Having two tasks, one for the httpd package (for Red Hat-based systems) and the other for the apache2 package (for Debian-based systems) in a playbook will make Ansible install both packages, and this execution will fail, as apache2 will not be available if you're installing...