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

Solving host connection issues

Ansible is often used to manage remote hosts or systems. To do this, Ansible will need to be able to connect to the remote host, and only after that will it be able to issue commands. Sometimes, the problem is that Ansible is unable to connect to the remote host. A typical example of this is when you try to manage a machine that hasn’t booted yet. Being able to quickly recognize these kinds of problems and fix them promptly will help you save a lot of time.

Follow these steps to get started:

  1. Let’s create a playbook called remote.yaml with the following content:
    ---
    - hosts: all
      tasks:
      - name: Touch a file
        ansible.builtin.file:
          path: /tmp/myfile
          state: touch
  2. We can try to run the remote.yaml playbook against a non-existent FQDN, as follows:
    $ ansible-playbook -i host.example.com, remote.yaml

In this case...