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

Accessing module documentation from the command line

As discussed in the preceding section, the Ansible project prides itself on its documentation, and making this documentation readily accessible is an important part of the project itself. Now, suppose you are working on an Ansible task (in a playbook, role, or even an ad hoc command) and you are in a data center environment where you only have access to the shell of the machine you are working on. How would you get access to the Ansible documentation?

Fortunately, part of the Ansible installation that we have not discussed yet is the ansible-doc tool, which is installed as standard along with the familiar ansible and ansible-playbook executables. The ansible-doc command includes a complete (text-based) library of documentation for all the modules that ship with the version of Ansible you have installed. This means that the very information you need to work with modules is at your fingertips, even if you are in the middle of a...