4 | From Beginner to Pro: Ansible Playbooks Explained

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Getting Started with Ansible Playbooks: A Step-by-Step Guide
What are playbooks in Ansible
Playbook examples
Sections and parameters in a playbook

What are Playbooks:
Ansible Playbooks are the building blocks of Ansible automation

They are YAML files that define the tasks and configurations that Ansible will apply to managed host machines

Playbooks are configuration files that provide a way to execute complex tasks with multiple steps and conditions

YAML stands for "YAML Ain't Markup Language" and is a human-readable language to represent data

Let’s see and understand some sample Playbooks

---
- name: Basic playbook
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Print a message
debug:
msg: "Hello, World!"

This playbook has three sections:
name, hosts and tasks

--- This is a YAML delimiter that indicates the start of the YAML document

The name section is a descriptive name for the playbook (optional)
The hosts section specifies the target hosts where the playbook will run
The tasks section contains the actual tasks to be executed


---
- name: Install Apache web server
hosts: webservers
become: yes
tasks:
- name: Install Apache
yum:
name: httpd
state: present


- name: Start Apache
service:
name: httpd
state: started
enabled: true


- name: Install and start Apache: This is the name of the playbook (optional)
hosts: webservers: hosts that the playbook will run on, e.g. host group named "webservers"
become: yes: This tells Ansible to use sudo to execute the tasks
tasks:: This is the section where the tasks to be performed are defined
- name: Install Apache: This is the name of the task (optional)
yum:: This is the module used to install packages on the target host.
name: httpd: This specifies the name of the package to be installed
state: present: This specifies that the package should be installed if it is not already present
- name: Start Apache: This is another task to start the Apache service.
service:: This is the module used to manage services on the target host
name: httpd: This specifies the name of the service to be managed.
state: started: This specifies that the service should be started
enabled: true: makes sure that the httpd service is set to start automatically when the system boots up
—

Quick Tips

On the machine where you have installed Ansible. Goto folder of playbook and run the commands

ansible-playbook -h shows options that can be used with this command
ansible-playbook --check playbook.yml Execute a dry-run of the playbook, without running on hosts
ansible-playbook --syntax-check playbook.yml Check the syntax of the playbook without actually running it
ansible-playbook --list-tasks playbook.yml List all tasks that will be executed by the playbook
ansible-playbook --list-host playbook.yml List all hosts that will be targeted by the playbook.
…

Check all options and parameters - https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/late...

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