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

Digging into playbook execution problems

There are cases where an Ansible execution will interrupt. Many things can cause these situations.

The network is the most frequent cause of problems I’ve found while executing Ansible playbooks. Since the machine issuing the commands and the one performing them are usually linked through the network, a problem in the network will immediately show itself as an Ansible execution problem.

You can tell Ansible to repeat the execution of a task by registering a variable and using the until keyword.

Sometimes, and this is particularly true for some modules, such as ansible.builtin.shell or ansible.builtin.command, the return code is non-zero, even though the execution was successful. In those cases, you can ignore the error by using the following line in your module:

ignore_errors: yes

For instance, if you run the /bin/false command, it will always return 1. To execute this in a playbook so that you can avoid it blocking there...