Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Ansible is a modern, YAML-based automation tool (built on top of Python, one of the world’s most popular programming languages) with a massive and ever-growing user base. Its popularity and Python underpinnings make it essential learning for all in the DevOps space. This fourth edition of Mastering Ansible provides complete coverage of Ansible automation, from the design and architecture of the tool and basic automation with playbooks to writing and debugging your own Python-based extensions. You'll learn how to build automation workflows with Ansible’s extensive built-in library of collections, modules, and plugins. You'll then look at extending the modules and plugins with Python-based code and even build your own collections — ultimately learning how to give back to the Ansible community. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be confident in all aspects of Ansible automation, from the fundamentals of playbook design to getting under the hood and extending and adapting Ansible to solve new automation challenges.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
7
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
13
Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

Summary

Ansible provides the capability to divide content logically into separate files. This capability helps project developers not repeat the same code over and over again. Roles within Ansible take this capability a step further and wrap some magic around the paths to the content. Roles are tunable, reusable, portable, and shareable blocks of functionality. Ansible Galaxy exists as a community hub for developers to find, rate, and share roles as well as collections. The ansible-galaxy command-line tool provides a method to interact with the Ansible Galaxy site or other role-sharing mechanisms. These capabilities and tools help with the organization and utilization of common code.

In this chapter, you learned all about inclusion concepts relating to tasks, handlers, variables, and even entire playbooks. Then, you expanded on this knowledge by learning about roles—their structure, setting default variable values, and handling role dependencies. You then proceeded...