commands to install Ansible

sudo apt install software-properties-commons
sudo apt-add-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

Command to generate default Ansible config file

ansible-config init --disabled > ansible.cfg

Adhoc commands

• Ping Remote server

ansible all -m ping

• Uptime of remote server

ansible all -m command -a uptime

• command to delete file in remote server

ansible ubuntu -m file -a "path=/home/ubuntu/devopsnext.pem state=absent"

Ansible Tags

• Targeting single play with task

ansible-playbook ansible_tagsy.yml --tags play1

• Targeting multiple tasks with multiple tasks

ansible-playbook ansible_tags.yml --tags "play1,play2"

• Command to skip Play with Tags

ansible-playbook ansible_tags.yml --skip-tags play1

• command to skip multiple play with Tags

ansible-playbook ansible_tags.yml --skip-tags "play1,play3"

• Command to list all the tags in the playbook

ansible-playbook ansible_tags.yml --list-tags

Ansible Facts

• Ansible collects pretty much all the information about the remote hosts as it runs a playbook.

• The task of collecting this remote system information is called as Gathering Facts by ansible and the details collected are generally known as facts

• Getting the Ansible Facts for Inventory

ansible ansible_facts.yml

Ansible Loop

• Installing Packages via Loop

ansible ansible_loop.yml

Ansible Dry Run

• Command to Dry run the playbook

ansible-playbook <playbook_name> --check

Ansible Syntax check

• Command to check the syntax Errors in the playbook

ansible-playbook <playbook_name> --syntax-check

Ansible Variables

• Variables in commandline

• Variables in Playbook

• Variables in vars.file

Variables in command line

• we can pass the variables in the command line like below

ansible-playbook -i inventory_grp playbook/vars/cli_vars.yml -e "package_name=git"

• we can also pass the variable inside the playbook

ansible-playbook -i inventory_grp playbook/vars/play_vars.yml

• To pass the variable inside the variables file

ansible-playbook -i inventory_grp playbook/vars/file_vars.yml

Ansibe Handlers

• Sometimes you want a task to run only when a change is made on a machine.
• For example, you may want to restart a service if a task updates the configuration of that service, but not if the configuration is unchanged.
• Ansible uses handlers to address this use case. Handlers are tasks that only run when notified.

- name: Changing Default Aapche port
  lineinfile:
    path: /etc/apache2/ports.conf
    regexp: '^Listen '
    line: Listen 8000
  notify: Restart apache

Reference : https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbook_guide/playbooks_handlers.html

Ansible Roles

Roles enable us to reuse and share our Ansible code efficiently. They provide a well-defined framework and structure for setting your tasks, variables, handlers, metadata, templates, and other files. This way, we can reference and call them in our playbooks with just a few lines of code while we can reuse the same roles over many projects without the need to duplicate our code.

• command to create Role

ansible-galaxy init <your_role_name>.

Role Structure

• defaults – Includes default values for variables of the role. Here we define some sane default variables, but they have the lowest priority and are usually overridden by other methods to customize the role.
• files – Contains static and custom files that the role uses to perform various tasks.
• handlers – A set of handlers that are triggered by tasks of the role.
• meta – Includes metadata information for the role, its dependencies, the author, license, available platform, etc.
• tasks – A list of tasks to be executed by the role. This part could be considered similar to the task section of a playbook.
• templates – Contains Jinja2 template files used by tasks of the role. (Read more about how to create an Ansible template.)
• tests – Includes configuration files related to role testing.
• vars – Contains variables defined for the role. These have quite a high precedence in Ansible.

Command to import Role

• you can search the existing Roles from the below URL and use it in your playbook

URL : https://galaxy.ansible.com/search?deprecated=false&keywords=&order_by=-relevance

• you can run the below command to import any existing Role
  • Lets download the Nginx Role and deploy it.

URL :

• https://galaxy.ansible.com/geerlingguy/jenkins
• https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-jenkins

ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.nginx

• Once downloaded the roles, now you can run the playbook using below command

ansible-playbook -i inventory_grp nginx.yml

Ansible Vault

Ansible feature that helps you encrypt confidential information without compromising security

• command to create Vault

ansible-vault create vars/user.yml

Note: The user.yml file should not be already exist.

• Command to encrypt existing file

ansible-vault encrypt vars/user.yml

• Command to decrypt the vault file

ansible-vault decrypt vars/user.yml

• Command to endit the encrypted file

ansible-vault edit vars/user.yml