Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By : Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH
Book Image

Ansible Playbook Essentials

By: Gourav Shah, GOURAV JAWAHAR SHAH

Overview of this book

Ansible Playbook Essentials will show you how to write a blueprint of your infrastructure, encompassing multitier applications using Ansible's playbooks. Beginning with basic concepts such as plays, tasks, handlers, inventory, and YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) syntax that Ansible uses, you'll understand how to organize your code into a modular structure. Building on this, you will study techniques to create data-driven playbooks with variables, templates, logical constructs, and encrypted data, which will further strengthen your application skills in Ansible. Adding to this, the book will also take you through advanced clustering concepts, such as discovering topology information about other nodes in the cluster and managing multiple environments with isolated configurations. As you approach the concluding chapters, you can expect to learn about orchestrating infrastructure and deploying applications in a coordinated manner. By the end of this book, you will be able to design solutions to your automation and orchestration problems using playbooks quickly and efficiently.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Ansible Playbook Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Setting Up the Learning Environment
References
Index

Chapter 3. Separating Code and Data – Variables, Facts, and Templates

In the previous chapter, we looked at how to write a role to provide modularity and abstraction. While doing so, we created the configuration file and copied the file over to the destination host using Ansible's copy module.

In this chapter, we will cover the following concepts:

  • How do you separate data from code?

  • What are Jinja2 templates? How are these created?

  • What are variables? How and where are they used?

  • What are system facts? How are they discovered?

  • What are the different types of variables?

  • What is a variable merge order? What are its precedence rules?