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

Executing ansible-playbook with encrypted files

To make use of our encrypted content, we first need to be able to inform ansible-playbook of how to access any encrypted data it might encounter. Unlike ansible-vault, which exists solely to deal with file encryption or decryption, ansible-playbook is more general-purpose, and it will not assume it is dealing with encrypted data by default. Fortunately, all of our familiar --vault-id parameters from the previous examples work just the same in ansible-playbook as they do in ansible-vault. Ansible will hold the provided passwords and IDs in memory for the duration of the playbook execution.

Let's now create a simple playbook named show_me.yaml that will print out the value of the variable inside of a_vars_file.yaml, which we encrypted in a previous example, as follows:

--- 
- name: show me an encrypted var 
  hosts: localhost 
  gather_facts: false 
 
  vars_files: 
    - a_vars_file...