Ansible is a great tool to automate the repetitive tasks on your servers. The target nodes will often be Linux but can also be Windows. The management server must be run on Linux.
Installation on a Linux CentOS 7 server.
The Ansible binaries are in the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux rpm (EPEL).
sudo yum -y update sudo yum -y wget wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm sudo rpm -iUvh epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
Install Ansible
sudo yum -y install ansible ansible --version
Create a first playbook script.
Ansible works with tasks in a file called a playbook. The nodes are defined in a hosts file and can be organised in a group. The default location is in /etc/ansible/hosts. Let’s add a Linux server to the Ansible hosts file.
[testservers] 192.168.178.11
Check if we can reach the server.
ansible testservers -m ping --ask-pass --user centos
Create our first playbook test.yml. Note that the position of the statements in a line are important similar as in Python. You can use -vvvv instead of –verbose to see more debugging information.
- hosts: testservers
vars:
directory: /home/centos
tasks:
- name: Test
command: "ls {{directory}}"
And run it:
ansible-playbook -i /etc/ansible/hosts --ask-pass --user centos test.yml --verbose
Or create a playbook update-servers.yml which updates your Linux server.
- hosts: testservers
tasks:
- name: Upgrade all packages
yum: name=* state=latest
ansible-playbook --ask-pass --user centos update-servers.yml --verbose
In this post we only touch the surface of Ansible but it might give you an idea what is possible.
References:
https://www.ansible.com/
https://docs.ansible.com/