Ansible Notes

Notes I took while working with Ansible for the first time.

• terms (source):
  • orchestration tools: designed to provision the servers themselves, e.g. CloudFormation, Terraform
  • configuration management tools: designed to install and manage software on existing servers, e.g. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack
• Ansible is a procedural configuration management tool

• list hosts that will be targeted by the given playbook

    $ ansible-playbook pb.yml -i ../environments/dev --list-hosts
  

• verbose mode up to 3 levels

    $ ansible-playbook pb.yml -i ../environments -vvv
  

• role_path is relative the location of the ansible.cfg ansible config file

• dry run

    $ ansible-playbook pb.yml --check
  

• multistage environments

    ├── environments
    │   ├── cross_env_vars
    │   ├── dev
    │   │   ├── ec2.ini -> ../ec2.ini
    │   │   ├── ec2.py -> ../ec2.py
    │   │   └── group_vars
    │   │       ├── all
    │   │       │   └── cross_env_vars -> ../../../cross_env_vars
    │   │       └── tag_role_api
    │   │           └── vars
    │   │           └── vault
    │   ├── prod
    │   │   ├── ec2.ini -> ../ec2.ini
    │   │   ├── ec2.py -> ../ec2.py
    │   │   └── group_vars
    │   │       ├── all
    │   │       │   └── cross_env_vars -> ../../../cross_env_vars
    │   │       └── tag_role_api
    │   │           └── vars
    │   │           └── vault
    │   ├── ec2.ini
    │   └── ec2.py
  

• with_items using dicts

• template accepts vars (this is not documented clearly)

    - template: src=test.j2 dest=/tmp/File1
      vars:
        myTemplateVariable: myDirName
  
    - template: src=test.j2 dest=/tmp/File2
      vars:
        myTemplateVariable: myOtherDir