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 custom plugins

In this section, we will take you through a practical guide to creating a plugin. The example will be, by necessity, simple. However, hopefully, it will serve you well in guiding you in the principles and best practices of plugin development and give you a solid foundation to build more complex plugins. We will even show you how to integrate these with your playbooks and, when you’re ready, submit them to the official Ansible project for inclusion.

As we noted when we built a module, Ansible is written in Python, and its plugins are no exception. As a result, you will need to write your plugin in Python; so, to get started on developing a plugin, you will need to make sure you have Python and a few essential tools installed. If you already have Ansible running on your development machine, you probably have the required packages installed.

Let’s get started with creating a plugin. Although there are many similarities between coding modules...