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 additional modules with ansible-galaxy

Most of the time when you work with collections, you won't be building them yourself. There are already 780 available on Ansible Galaxy at the time of writing and, there will probably be many more by the time you read this book. Nonetheless, it is the author's personal belief that we all learn better when we can get our hands dirty, and thus, developing our own, albeit simple, collection was a great way for us to look at how they are put together and how they are referenced.

However, let's focus now on finding and then working with pre-existing collections on Ansible, as this is where your focus is likely to be most of the time. As we have already mentioned, the Ansible 4.3 package includes a set of collections for you to begin your automation journey with, along with the ansible.builtin collection included with the ansible-core package.

If you want to see which collections got installed when you installed Ansible...