Ansible is an automation and orchestration engine.

• Simple automation language that can perfectly describe IT application infrastructure in Ansible Playbooks
• An automation engine that runs Ansible Playbooks
• Ansible Tower is an enterprise framework for controlling, securing and managing your Ansible automation wit a UI and a Restful API
• It's simple, powerful and agentless (OpenSSH & WinRM)
• There are over 450 Ansible-provided modules to automate your environment.

# Resources

• Documentation
• Jira Module

# Install

# Host install

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-add-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
$ sudo apt-get install ansible

# Target Machines

• Python and OpenSSH/Powershell
• apt-get install python-minimal -no-install-recommends
• Connect via SSH and accept the host key --accept-hostkey

# Config

• Unix-style. First ANSIBLE_CFG environment variable
• ansible.cfg in current dir
• User home dir ~./.ansible.cfg
• Default settings - /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg Have a look for available settings!

# Inventories

Ansible cannot do anything without the hosts inventory file. It contains a list of (grouped) of hosts that Ansible can work against. It uses ini-file syntax.

Default is in /etc/ansible/hosts

[allservers]
10.0.3.107
10.0.3.35

[web]
10.0.3.107
...

Add a similarly structured inventory file in your working folder

ansible-playbook -i inventory

# Using Ansible

• Run ad-hoc commands: ansible <inventory> -m
• Run playbooks: ansible-playbook
• Use Automation Framework: Ansible Tower

# Commands

Use for running one-off tasks

ansible 127.0.0.1 -m ping -u root                       # ping a host
ansible web -m ping -u root -i hosts                    # ping all hosts grouped under web in inventory hosts 
ansible allmachines -a "free -m" -i hosts -u root       # Run raw command
ansible allmachines -a "dpkg -l | grep nginx" -i hosts -u root
ansible web -a "apt-get update" -i hosts -u root
ansible web -a "apt-get -y install nginx" -i hosts -u root # install nginx on all web hosts
ansible web -m service -a "name=nginx state=restarted" -i hosts -u root

# Playbooks

• A Playbook contains plays
• Plays contain tasks
• Tasks call modules
• Tasks run sequentially
• Handlers are triggered by tasks, and are run once, at the end of plays
• An ansible playbook is a collection of tasks
• Plain-text YAML files describing desired state
• Human and machine readable
• Can build entire application environments

Altering the way it runs:

with_items, fail_when, changed_when, until, ignore_errors

# Variables

• Playbooks
• Files
• Inventories (group vars, host vars)
• Command line
• Discovered variables (facts)
• Ansible Tower

# Modules

Ansible modules implement different tasks you can use to automate.

module: directive1=value directive2=value

# Roles

An Ansible Role is a fully self-contained playbook. Galaxy is a community for these.