Ansible

The architecture of an environment managed by Ansible features several concepts:

Controller host which contains playbooks which are executed
Managed hosts which are controlled using SSH

Tasks

Hello, World!

---
- name: Hello, World! playbook
  hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Hello, World! play
    command: echo Hello, World!
... # (1)

Ad-hoc

ansible all -m command -a "echo Hello, World!"

Configuration

ansible.cfg

[privilege_escalation]
become=yes
become_method=sudo
become_user=root
become_ask_pass=no
remote_user=ansible

[defaults]
interpreter_python=auto_silent
deprecation_warnings=False

Display non-default settings

ansible-config dump --only-changed

Documentation

ansible-doc

# List currently installed modules
ansible-doc -l

# Get module-specific information
ansible-doc $MODULE

# Get example code
ansible-doc -s $MODULE

Verify YAML syntax

ansible-playbook --syntax-check $FILE

Files

Create file

---
- name: Create file
  hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Create file
    copy:
      dest: /etc/motd
      content: "Hello, World!\n" # (1)
...

Alma Linux 9 requires an additional package to be installed to handle SELinux contexts:

# This package is incorrectly identified as "libselinux-python" in the Ansible error displayed on the controller host
dnf install python3-libselinux

Delete file

---
- name: Delete file
  hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Delete file
    file:
      path: /etc/motd
      state: absent
...