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

Module return values

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, Ansible modules return their results as structured data, formatted behind the scenes in JSON. You came across this return data in the previous example, both in the form of an exit code and where we used the register keyword to capture the results of a task in an Ansible variable. In this section, we shall explore how to discover the return values for an Ansible module so that we can work with them later on in a playbook, for example, with conditional processing (see Chapter 4, Playbooks and Roles).

Due to conserving space, we shall choose what is perhaps one of the simplest Ansible modules to work with when it comes to return values – the ping module.

Without further ado, let’s use the ansible-doc tool that we learned about in the previous section and see what this says about the return values for this module:

$ ansible-doc ping

If you scroll to the bottom of the output from the preceding command...