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

Exploring the configuration file

Ansible’s behavior is, in part, defined by its configuration file. The central configuration file (which impacts the behavior of Ansible for all users on the system) can be found at /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg. However, this is not the only place Ansible will look for its configuration; in fact, it will look in the following locations, from the top to the bottom.

The first instance of the file is the configuration it will use; all of the others are ignored, even if they are present:

  • ANSIBLE_CONFIG: The file location specified by the value of this environment variable, if set
  • ansible.cfg: In the current working directory
  • ~/.ansible.cfg: In the home directory of the user
  • /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg: The central configuration that we previously mentioned

If you installed Ansible through a package manager, such as dnf, yum, or apt, you will almost always find a default configuration file called ansible.cfg in /etc/ansible...