Book Image

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

By : Fabio Alessandro Locati
Book Image

Learning Ansible 2.7 - Third Edition

By: Fabio Alessandro Locati

Overview of this book

Ansible is an open source automation platform that assists organizations with tasks such as application deployment, orchestration, and task automation. With the release of Ansible 2.7, even complex tasks can be handled much more easily than before. Learning Ansible 2.7 will help you take your first steps toward understanding the fundamentals and practical aspects of Ansible by introducing you to topics such as playbooks, modules, and the installation of Linux, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Windows support. In addition to this, you will focus on various testing strategies, deployment, and orchestration to build on your knowledge. The book will then help you get accustomed to features including cleaner architecture, task blocks, and playbook parsing, which can help you to streamline automation processes. Next, you will learn how to integrate Ansible with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) before gaining insights into the enterprise versions of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. This will help you to use Ansible to interact with different operating systems and improve your working efficiency. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the Ansible skills you need to automate complex tasks for your organization.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Creating a Web Server Using Ansible
4
Section 2: Deploying Playbooks in a Production Environment
9
Section 3: Deploying an Application with Ansible
13
Section 4: Deploying an Application with Ansible

The Ansible template – Jinja filters

We have seen in Chapter 2, Automating Simple Tasks, this templates allow you to dynamically complete your playbook and place files on servers based on dynamic data such as host and group variables. In this section, we will move forward and see how Jinja2 filters work with Ansible.

Jinja2 filters are simple Python functions that take some arguments, process them, and return the result. For example, consider the following command:

{{ myvar | filter }}

In the preceding example, myvar is a variable; Ansible will pass myvar to the Jinja2 filter as an argument. The Jinja2 filter will then process it and return the resulting data. Jinja2 filters even accept additional arguments, as follows:

{{ myvar | filter(2) }}

In this example, Ansible will now pass two arguments, that is, myvar and 2. Likewise, you can pass multiple arguments to filters...