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Lab: Creating Your First Ansible Playbook

Overview

In this lab, you will create and run your first Ansible playbook. A playbook is a YAML file where you define the tasks and settings for Ansible to execute on your hosts.

You'll learn the basics of playbook structure and how to perform simple tasks.

Objectives

  • Understand the structure of an Ansible playbook.
  • Create a playbook with basic tasks.
  • Run the playbook on a group of web servers.

Prerequisites

  • Basic knowledge of YAML syntax.
  • Ansible installed on your Ansible machine (the machine where you run Ansible commands).
  • Access to one or more hosts (like web servers) where you have SSH access and Ansible is configured to manage them.

Duration

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

Instructions

Step 1: Create Your Playbook File

  1. On your Ansible machine, open a text editor and create a new file named first_play.yml.

  2. Add the following content to the file:

    ---
- name: Our First Play
  hosts: webservers
  gather_facts: no

  tasks:
    - name: Print something
      debug:
        msg: "Hello World"

    - name: Print something else
      debug:
        msg: "Good bye"

    Here's a breakdown of what each part does:

    • --- signifies the start of a YAML file.
    • The first section defines the play:
      • name: A human-readable name for the play.
      • hosts: Specifies the group of hosts to target, in this case, webservers.
      • gather_facts: Set to no to skip gathering system facts (to speed up execution for this simple task).
    • Under tasks, we define what we want Ansible to do:
      • Each - name is a human-readable description of the task.
      • debug is a module provided by Ansible to print messages to the console.

Step 2: Run Your Playbook

  1. Save the first_play.yml file.

  2. Run the playbook using the ansible-playbook command:

    ansible-playbook first_play.yml

  3. Observe the output. Ansible will connect to the hosts in the webservers group and execute the tasks you defined. You should see "Hello World" and "Good bye" messages in the output.

Step 3: Experiment and Explore

  • Try modifying the messages in the debug tasks and rerun the playbook to see how the output changes.
  • Experiment with targeting different host groups, if you have them configured.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You've successfully created and run your first Ansible playbook. This foundational skill is a stepping stone to more complex Ansible automation tasks. As you become more comfortable with playbooks, you'll be able to automate a wide range of tasks on your managed hosts. 👏