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

Templating the Nginx configurations


You have learnt a lot about facts, variables, and templates. Now, lets transform our Nginx role to be data driven. We will start templating the default.conf file for Nginx that we created earlier. The approach toward converting a file into a template would be as follows:

  1. Create the directories required to hold templates and default variables inside a role:

    $ mkdir roles/nginx/templates
    $ mkdir roles/nginx/defaults
    
  2. Always start with the actual configuration file, our end result of this process, to know all of the parameters it would take. Then, work backwards. For example, the configuration for the default.conf file on our system is as follows:

            server {
                     listen       80;
                     server_name  localhost; 
                     location / {
                        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
                        index  index.html;
                   }
             }
  3. Identify the configuration parameters that you would like to generate dynamically...