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

Creating your own collections

We have learned a great deal about collections and how to manage and maintain them. Let’s now complete your knowledge on this topic by creating your own one from scratch, thus giving you a full overview of how they are put together and how they work.

As with roles (see Chapter 4, Playbooks and Roles), collections are simply an organized set of files within directories. Although you can look up all these directories and create them by hand, we can also get the ansible-galaxy utility to create a blank template for us to work with.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. We know that we need both a namespace and a collection name. If we publish on the Ansible Galaxy website, then the namespace will be our GitHub handle, as Ansible Galaxy takes this and uses it as your namespace. In our case, we won’t be publishing to Ansible Galaxy, so I’ll choose the namespace practicalansible, but feel free to substitute this with your GitHub...