Ansible Home Lab (Fresher Project)

This repository contains a simple, fresher-friendly Ansible home lab project. It demonstrates how to provision a basic web role that serves a minimal HTML page using configuration driven by variables and templates.

What this project shows

• Inventory management with hosts.ini
• Role-based structure via the web role (tasks, handlers, vars, templates)
• Idempotent playbook execution with site.yml

Prerequisites

• Ansible installed on your control machine
• SSH access to your target host(s)
• Python available on managed nodes (standard for most Linux distros)

Project layout

ansible-project/
├─ hosts.ini
├─ site.yml
└─ roles/
   └─ web/
      ├─ tasks/main.yml
      ├─ handlers/main.yml
      ├─ vars/main.yml
      └─ templates/index.html.j2

Inventory example (hosts.ini)

[web]
your.web.host ansible_user=your_user

Replace your.web.host and your_user with your target host and SSH user.

Playbook (site.yml)

The root playbook applies the web role to hosts in the web group.

Role: web

• Installs and configures a simple web server
• Deploys an index.html from the Jinja2 template templates/index.html.j2
• Uses variables from vars/main.yml

How to run

ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini site.yml

Add -K if privilege escalation is required, or -k/--ask-pass if you use password auth.

Customization

• Update roles/web/vars/main.yml to change the page title or content.
• Modify roles/web/templates/index.html.j2 for custom markup or styling.

Troubleshooting

• Verify SSH connectivity: ansible -i hosts.ini web -m ping
• Increase verbosity: add -vvv to commands for detailed logs

Notes

• This is intentionally minimal to suit a fresher-level home lab. Expand it by adding more roles, handlers, templates, and CI as you grow comfortable with Ansible.