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

Developing custom modules

Now that we’re familiar with modules, how to call them, how to interpret their results, and how to find documentation on them, we can make a start on writing a simple module. Although this will not include the deep and intricate functionality of many of the modules that ship with Ansible, it is hoped that this will give you enough information to proceed with confidence when you build out your own, more complex, ones.

One important point to note is that Ansible is written in Python 3, and as such, so are its modules. As a result, you will need to write your module in Python 3; to get started with developing your own module, you will need to make sure you have Python 3 and a few essential tools installed. If you are already running Ansible on your development machine, you probably have the required packages installed, but if you are starting from scratch, you will need to install Python 3, the Python 3 package manager (pip3), and perhaps some other...