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

Using Python modules


Ansible intends to allow users to write modules in any language. Writing the module in Python, however, has its own advantages. You can take advantage of Ansible's libraries to shorten your code, an advantage not available for modules in other languages. Parsing user arguments, handling errors, and returning the required values becomes easier with the help of the Ansible libraries. We will see two examples for a custom Python module, one with and one without using the Ansible library, to give you a glimpse of how custom modules work. Make sure you organize your directory structure as mentioned in the previous section before creating the module. The first example creates a module named check_user. To do so, we will need to create the check_user file in the library folder within the Ansible top-level directory, with the following content:

    #!/usr/bin/env python 
 
    import pwd 
    import sys 
    import shlex 
    import json 
 
    def main(): 
        # Parsing...