Book Image

Practical Ansible - Second Edition

By : James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati, Daniel Oh
Book Image

Practical Ansible - Second Edition

By: James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati, Daniel Oh

Overview of this book

Ansible empowers you to automate a myriad of tasks, including software provisioning, configuration management, infrastructure deployment, and application rollouts. It can be used as a deployment tool as well as an orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime. In this book, you'll work with the latest release of Ansible and learn how to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You'll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and learn concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and roles. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. Additionally, you'll understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be well versed in writing playbooks and other related Ansible code to overcome all your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-a-code provisioning to application deployments and handling mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
6
Part 2:Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
12
Part 3:Using Ansible in an Enterprise

Configuring playbook prompts

So far, all of our playbooks have had their data specified for them at runtime in variables we defined within the playbook. However, what if you actually want to obtain information from someone during a playbook run? Perhaps you want a user to select a version of a package to install? Or, perhaps you want to obtain a password from a user for an authentication task without storing it anywhere. (Although Ansible Vault can encrypt the data at rest, some companies may forbid the storing of passwords and other such credentials in tools that they have not evaluated.) Fortunately, for these instances (and many more), Ansible can prompt you for user input and store the input in a variable for future processing.

Let’s reuse the two host frontend inventories we defined at the beginning of this chapter. Now, let’s demonstrate how to capture data from users during a playbook run with a practical example:

  1. Create a simple play definition in the...