Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By : James Freeman, Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

By: James Freeman, Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

Ansible is a modern, YAML-based automation tool (built on top of Python, one of the world’s most popular programming languages) with a massive and ever-growing user base. Its popularity and Python underpinnings make it essential learning for all in the DevOps space. This fourth edition of Mastering Ansible provides complete coverage of Ansible automation, from the design and architecture of the tool and basic automation with playbooks to writing and debugging your own Python-based extensions. You'll learn how to build automation workflows with Ansible’s extensive built-in library of collections, modules, and plugins. You'll then look at extending the modules and plugins with Python-based code and even build your own collections — ultimately learning how to give back to the Ansible community. By the end of this Ansible book, you'll be confident in all aspects of Ansible automation, from the fundamentals of playbook design to getting under the hood and extending and adapting Ansible to solve new automation challenges.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
7
Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
13
Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible

Roles (structures, defaults, and dependencies)

With a functional understanding of the inclusion of variables, tasks, handlers, and playbooks, we can move on to the more advanced topic of roles. Roles bring together these different facets of Ansible code creation to provide a fully independent collection of variables, tasks, files, templates, and modules that can be reused over again in different playbooks. Although not limited as such by design, it is normal practice for each role to be typically limited to a particular purpose or desired end result, with all the necessary steps to reach that result either within the role itself or through dependencies (in other words, further roles that themselves are specified as dependencies of a role). It is important to note that roles are not playbooks, and there is no way to directly execute a role. Roles have no settings for which host(s) the role will apply to. Top-level playbooks are the glue that binds the hosts from your...