Book Image

Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With Ansible, even complex tasks can be handled easier than before. In this book, you will learn about the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible 2 by diving deeply into topics such as installation (Linux, BSD, and Windows Support), playbooks, modules, various testing strategies, provisioning, deployment, and orchestration. In this book, you will get accustomed with the new features of Ansible 2 such as cleaner architecture, task blocks, playbook parsing, new execution strategy plugins, and modules. You will also learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as AWS. The book ends with the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy, where you will learn to interact Ansible with different OSes to speed up your work to previously unseen levels By the end of the book, you’ll able to leverage the Ansible parameters to create expeditious tasks for your organization by implementing the Ansible 2 techniques and paradigms.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Ansible 2 Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 8. Debugging and Error Handling

Like software code, testing infrastructure code is an all-important task. There should ideally be no code floating around in production that has not been tested, especially when you have strict customer SLAs to meet, and this is true even for the infrastructure. In this chapter, we'll look at syntactic checks, testing without applying the code on the machines (the no-op mode), and functional testing for playbooks, which are at the core of Ansible and trigger the various tasks you want to perform on the remote hosts. It is recommended that you integrate some of these into your Continuous Integration (CI) system that you have for Ansible to better test your playbooks. We'll be looking at the following points:

  • Syntax checking

  • Checking the mode with and without diff

  • Functional testing

As part of functional testing, we will be looking at:

  • Assertions on the end state of the system

  • Testing with tags

  • Serverspec (a different tool, but can work wonderfully with Ansible...