RHCE Ansible Series #3: Ansible Playbooks

In the previous tutorial, you learned how to use Ansible ad-hoc commands to run a single task on your managed hosts. In this tutorial, you will learn how to automate multiple tasks on your managed hosts by creating and running Ansible playbooks.

To better understand the differences between Ansible ad-hoc command and Ansible playbooks; you can think of Ansible ad-hoc commands as Linux commands and playbooks as bash scripts.

Ansible ad-hoc commands are ideal to perform tasks that are not executed frequently such us getting servers uptime, retrieving system information, etc.

On the other hand, Ansible playbooks are ideal to automate complex tasks like system patches, application deployments, firewall configurations, user management, etc.

Please notice that I have included all the playbooks, scripts, and files that I am going to discuss in this series in this GitHub repository.

Before you follow this Ansible Playbook tutorial, you should refer to the setup mentioned in the first chapter of the Ansible series.

Creating your first Ansible playbook

Playbooks are written in YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) format. If you don’t know YAML; I have included the most important YAML syntax rules in the figure below so you can easily follow along with all the playbook examples:

You should also be aware that YAML files also must have either a .yaml or .yml extension. I personally prefer .yml because it’s less typing, and I am lazy.

Also, YAML is indentation sensitive. A two-spaces indentation is the recommended indentation to use in YAML; however, YAML will follow whatever indentation system a file uses as long as it’s consistent.

It is beyond annoying to keep hitting two spaces in your keyboard and so do yourself a favor and include the following line in ~/.vimrc file:

autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ai ts=2 sw=2 et

This will convert the tabs into two spaces whenever you are working on a YAML file. Liked this handy Vim tip? You can get this book for advanced Vim tips.