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

Installing Ansible from scratch

As discussed in the preceding section, Ansible 4.3 is largely packaged and distributed using a Python package manager called pip. This is likely to change in due course, but at the time of writing, the key installation method you will need to use is to install via pip. Now, it's fair to say that most modern Linux distributions already come with Python and pip pre-installed. If for any reason you get stuck and need to install it, the process is well documented on the official website here: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/.

Once you have pip installed, the process of installing Ansible is as simple as running this command, and the beauty is, the command is the same on all operating systems (though note that on some operating systems, your pip command might be called pip3 to differentiate between the Python 2.7 and Python 3 releases that may coexist):

sudo pip install ansible

There are, of course, a few variations on this command...