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

Working with variables


Ansible allows you to define variables in many ways, from a variable file within a playbook, by passing it from the Ansible command using the -e / --extra-vars option, or by passing it to an inventory file. You can define variables in an inventory file either on a per-host basis, for an entire group, or by creating a variable file in the directory where your inventory file exists.

Host variables

It's possible to declare variables for a specific host, declaring them in the hosts file. For instance, we may want to specify different engines for our web servers. Let's suppose that one needs to reply to a specific domain, while the other to a different domain name. In this case, we would do it with the following hosts file:

[webserver] 
ws01.fale.io domainname=example1.fale.io 
ws02.fale.io domainname=example2.fale.io 
 
[database] 
db01.fale.io 

In this way, all playbooks running on web servers will be able to refer to the domain name variable...