Book Image

Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With Ansible, even complex tasks can be handled easier than before. In this book, you will learn about the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible 2 by diving deeply into topics such as installation (Linux, BSD, and Windows Support), playbooks, modules, various testing strategies, provisioning, deployment, and orchestration. In this book, you will get accustomed with the new features of Ansible 2 such as cleaner architecture, task blocks, playbook parsing, new execution strategy plugins, and modules. You will also learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as AWS. The book ends with the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy, where you will learn to interact Ansible with different OSes to speed up your work to previously unseen levels By the end of the book, you’ll able to leverage the Ansible parameters to create expeditious tasks for your organization by implementing the Ansible 2 techniques and paradigms.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Ansible 2 Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Working with the local_action feature


The local_action feature of Ansible is a powerful one, especially when we think of Orchestration. This feature allows you to run certain tasks locally on the machine that runs Ansible.

Consider the following situations:

  • Spawning a new machine or creating a JIRA ticket

  • Managing your command center(s) in terms of installing packages and setting up configurations

  • Calling a load balancer API to disable a certain web server entry from the load balancer

These are tasks that can be run on the same machine that runs the ansible-playbook command rather than logging in to a remote box and running these commands.

Let's look at an example. Suppose you want to run a shell module on your local system where you are running your Ansible playbook. The local_action option comes into the picture in such situations. If you pass the module name and the module argument to local_action, it will run that module locally. Let's see how this option works with the shell module. Consider...