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

Developing plugins

Plugins are another way of extending or modifying the functionality of Ansible. While modules are executed as tasks, plugins are utilized in a variety of other places. Plugins are broken down into a few types, based on where they would plug into the Ansible execution. Ansible ships some plugins for each of these areas, and end users can create their own to extend the functionality of these specific areas.

Connection-type plugins

Any time Ansible makes a connection to a host to perform a task, a connection plugin is used. Ansible ships with a few connection plugins, including ssh, community.docker.docker, local, and winrm. Additional connection mechanisms can be utilized by Ansible to connect to remote systems by creating a connection plugin, which may be useful if you must connect to some new type of system, such as a network switch, or perhaps your refrigerator someday. To create a new connection plugin, we would have to understand and work with an underlying...