Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By : Mohamed Alibi
Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By: Mohamed Alibi

Overview of this book

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Ad hoc versus playbook: the ping module


As discussed previously, Ansible ad hoc can be used for a quick check, such as running a ping command to check if the hosts are up and running. The command should look as follows:

ansible servers -m ping

The output of the command will look similar to the following:

The ping module can also be used in the playbook as part of the bigger script, where the result of the ping can be piped to be the condition for another action. The playbook code is as follows:

---
- name: Ping module playbook usage
  hosts: servers
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: ping the local servers
      ping:

The output of this code will look as follows: