Lesson 01

Forward

Thank you for taking the time to read through this interactive document; this being the first of 3 parts.

I hope these hands-on, interactive lessons can reduce the startup cost of learning and eventually mastering Ansible.

The Web Terminal

If you want to take advantage of the interactive, hands-on nature of these labs, you'll need to either already have a web terminal connection available or fire one up yourself.

Instructions for that can be found here.

Lesson 01

Here's what I will cover in this segment of my Ansible tutorial series:

• What is ansible?
• How to install Ansible on Windows/Linux/MacOS
• How to prepare a test environment for Ansible using Docker

Let's begin.

What is Ansible?

As defined in https://www.techtarget.com

Ansible is a configuration management tool from Red Hat that automates the process of configuring multiple servers and deploying applications.

It speeds up installing software, configuring servers, and most importantly reduces manual, error-prone methods for managing modern infrastructure components.

It is also a great alternative to Puppet and Chef.

Both are similar tools to Ansible, but in my opinion Ansible is much easier to learn and master.

In a nutshell, Ansible:

• Is like a higher-level, idempotent version of traditional shell scripts
• Is much, much easier to rapidly develop and manage, since its automation is (mostly) defined using yaml
• Lends itself to self-documenting development

Terminology

Throughout the sections ahead, I'll make reference to the following ansible terms:

• inventory - This is how ansible is made aware of the machines it is to manage
• playbooks - This is the ansible version of a bash script
• tasks - Think of this as you would a neatly commented step in a bash script, only far more superior in structure and clarity
• variables - Just like bash variables, ansible stores repeatable information in these named constructs
• facts - Very similar to variables, but think more of these as values that
  are automatically derived from a machine
  or from a little bit of ansible magic

For more information on ansible terms, consult the Ansible Glossary

Let's go over installing Ansible

Installing Ansible

Debian Systems

Installation on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y curl software-properties-common || sudo apt-get install -y python-software-properties
sudo apt-get -y autoremove
sudo apt-get install -y --allow-unauthenticated python-setuptools python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev git sshpass tree
sudo apt-get -y install python-pip
sudo pip install ansible cryptography

RHEL Systems

Installation on CentOS 8.x, Oracle Enterprise Linux 8.x

rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
yum install -y ansible

In the next sections, we'll cover writing and launching ansible playbooks.

My editor of choice is Sublime 3 Text Editor, but we'll be using vi throughout this lab.

Writing ansible playbooks

As defined in https://www.techtarget.com:

An Ansible playbook is an organized unit of scripts that defines the tasks involved in managing a system configuration using the automation tool Ansible.

Read more from the official documentation

Let's create our first playbook:

• Create a folder for your playbook:
  mkdir -p sandbox
• Create a playbook under this path named hello.yaml
  touch sandbox/hello.yaml
• Add the playbook definition with a single debug task:
  

  echo -e """
  - hosts: localhost
    connection: local
    tasks:
      - name: debug | Say Hello!
        debug:
          msg: |
            Hello from the imported playbook!
  """ >> sandbox/hello.yaml 
  

• Run the playbook locally:
  ansible-playbook -i 'localhost ansible_connection=local,' sandbox/hello.yaml

That's it! You've executed your first ansible playbook!

Wrap Up

This concludes lesson-01.

In lesson-02, we'll be converting a complicated bash shell script into an Ansible Playbook.

Lesson-02 will cover:

• Playbooks and Tasks
• Templates and Handlers
• Variables & Facts
• Task Blocks