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

Summary

Jinja2 is a powerful language that is extensively used by Ansible. Not only is it used to generate file content, but it is also used to make portions of a playbook dynamic. Mastering Jinja2 is vital for creating and maintaining elegant and efficient playbooks and roles.

In this chapter, we learned how to build simple templates with Jinja2 and render them from an Ansible playbook. Additionally, we learned how to make effective use of control structures, how to manipulate data, and even how to perform comparisons and tests on variables to both control the flow of Ansible playbooks (by keeping the code lightweight and efficient) and create and manipulate data without the need for duplicate definitions or excessive numbers of variables.

In the next chapter, we will explore Ansible's capability in more depth to define what constitutes a change or failure for tasks within a play.