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

Running Ansible from Windows

If you browse the official installation documentation for Ansible, you will find a variety of instructions for most mainstream Linux variants, Solaris, macOS, and FreeBSD. You will note, however, that there is no mention of Windows. There is a good reason for this – for those interested in the technical detail, Ansible makes extensive use of the POSIX fork() syscall in its operations, and no such call exists on Windows. POSIX compatibility projects, such as the venerable Cygwin, have attempted to implement fork() on Windows, but sometimes this does not work correctly even today. As a result, despite there being a viable Python implementation for Windows, Ansible cannot be run natively on this platform without the presence of this important syscall.

The good news is that, if you are running recent versions of Windows 10, or Windows Server 2016 or 2019, installing and running Ansible is now incredibly easy thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux ...