Book Image

Learn Ansible

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Learn Ansible

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

The Ansible Commands

Before we move on to writing and executing more advanced playbooks, we are going to take a look at the inbuilt Ansible commands. Here, we will cover the usage of the set of commands that makes up Ansible. Towards the end of the chapter, we will also install a few third-party tools, one being an inventory grapher, which will let us visualize our hosts, and the second allows you to record your playbook runs.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Inbuilt commands:
    • ansible
    • ansible-config
    • ansible-console
    • ansible-doc
    • ansible-inventory
    • ansible-vault
  • Third-party commands:
    • ansible-inventory-grapher
    • ara