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

Control structures

In Jinja2, a control structure refers to the statements in a template that control the flow of the engine parsing the template. These structures include conditionals, loops, and macros. Within Jinja2 (assuming the defaults are in use), a control structure will appear inside blocks of {% ... %}. These opening and closing blocks alert the Jinja2 parser that a control statement has been provided instead of a normal string or variable name.

Conditionals

A conditional within a template creates a decision path. The engine will consider the conditional and choose from two or more potential blocks of code. There is always a minimum of two: a path if the conditional is met (evaluated as true), and either an explicitly defined else path if the conditional is not met (evaluated as false) or, alternatively, an implied else path consisting of an empty block.

The statement for a conditional is the if statement. This...