Ansible in an hour

I stumbled upon a nice server automation course made by an expert I follow. I don’t do many tedious, repeatable tasks in my daily work, but I wanted to prepare for future.

Ansible is useful for bulk server configuration, application deployment, and other automation tasks. The course I finished is very compact, but it explains the most important topics:

• Prepping Ansible for use (installation, management node, inventories)
• Ad-hoc modules (running commands on all servers)
• YAML configs (playbooks)
• Facts, variables
• Playbook creation (generating SSH keys, using variables, loops, groups, creating users, conditionals, file operations, tags, templates, firewall config)
• External roles (using playbooks from Ansible Galaxy, Docker containers)
• Creating own roles (complete web server setup example)
• Ansible Lint (config validation)
• Ansible Dynamic Inventory (useful for large server farms)
• Ansible Vault (credentials storage)
• Ansible AWX (free counterpart of Ansible Tower; a web interface for playbook management)

Looks like a quite useful, pretty complex tool. Sadly, most of the Linux servers I use are handled by Laravel ecosystem tools, so I might need to wait a while before putting Ansible to use.