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

Running your first playbook from AWX

As in Ansible, in AWX, the goal is running an Ansible playbook. Each playbook that is run is called a job. Since AWX gives you more flexibility and automation than Ansible, it requires a little bit more configuration before you can run your first job, so let’s dive into it, starting with creating an AWX project.

Creating an AWX project

AWX uses the term project to identify a repository of Ansible playbooks. AWX projects support the placement of playbooks in all major Source Control Management (SCM) systems, such as Git and SVN, but also support playbooks on the filesystem or playbooks provided by Red Hat Insights. To create a project, follow these steps:

  1. First of all, you need to go to Projects from the left-hand side menu bar, then click the Add button in the top-left section of the screen. This will open a window, similar to the following:
Figure 13.1 – The Create New Project window

Figure 13.1 – The Create New Project window

...