Book Image

Practical Ansible 2

By : Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

Practical Ansible 2

By: Daniel Oh, James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Ansible enables you to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application roll-outs, and can be used as a deployment and 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 Ansible 2.9 and learn 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 get to grips with concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and network modules. As you progress, you'll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. In addition to this, you'll also 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 just about all of your IT challenges, from infrastructure-as-code provisioning to application deployments, and even handling the mundane day-to-day maintenance tasks that take up so much valuable time.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Learning the Fundamentals of Ansible
6
Section 2: Expanding the Capabilities of Ansible
11
Section 3: Using Ansible in an Enterprise

Module return values

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, Ansible modules return their results as structured data, formatted behind the scenes in JSON. You came across this return data in the previous example, both in the form of exit code and where we used the register keyword to capture the results of a task in an Ansible variable. In this section, we shall explore how to discover the return values for an Ansible module so that we can work with them later on in a playbook, for example, with conditional processing (see Chapter 4, Playbooks and Roles).

Due to conserving space, we shall choose what is perhaps one of the simplest Ansible modules to work with when it comes to return values the ping module.

Without further ado, let's use the ansible-doc tool that we learned about in the previous section and see what this says about the return values for this module...