As I mentioned in my previous post, I will be starting with Ansible series. Best way to find all posts in Ansible series to use this link.

If you’re reading this post, chances are you already know what Ansible is and what it is used for. So, instead of repeating what numerous other posts across the Internet already have to say, I’d try to put it in short as to what we use Ansible for and how it helps us.

We use Ansible as a configurtation and deployment tool. It helps us configure systems with the packages and tools we need on it to deploy the end product. We use Ansible Playbooks (will talk about this in later posts) to install packages, start services and ensure things are up and fine. We plan to use its “Continuous Deployment” feature to automate deployments on different environments (pre-prod, prod, etc.)

Let’s get into setting up Ansible on our system and perform some tasks with it. Ansible is generally used to configure remote systems but, for this post, we’ll be using it on localhost only. That is, install it on localhost and perform operations on localhost as well.

We’re going to use CentOS 7 system for the purpose of this series. Except installation, all other steps should work just fine irrespective of the underlying distro.

Installation Link to heading 

$ yum -y install ansible

At the time of writing this, above command will install version 2.3.2.0-2.el7 for us. If you’d rather want to install the latest (bleeding edge) version, follow below steps:

$ yum -y install epel-release
$ yum -y install python-pip
$ pip install ansible

Benefit of installing via yum is that packages in official RHEL/CentOS repositories undergo a good deal of testing to ensure enterprise stability and security.

What we get upon Ansible installation? Link to heading

Once you’ve installed Ansible, on your command line, type ansible and hit Tab key twice to load all possible commands that start with ansible.

Ones we will be discussing in this series are:

  • ansible: runs a specified task on target host(s).

  • ansible-console: drops you into a shell that works as REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop). It allows running ad-hoc tasks against a chosen inventory.

  • ansible-doc: provides documentation on the command prompt. It’s really helpful for quick references where we are not completely sure but have a rough idea.

    ansible-doc yum would print help for the yum module whereas ansible-doc -s yum would print a snippet which can then be copied to playbook and modified.

  • ansible-galaxy: helps us manage roles using Ansible Galaxy.

  • ansible-playbook: is the most interesting and heavy lifter among all. It executes a playbook passed to it as an argument. We’ll have quite a few posts on this. 😉

  • ansible-pull: pulls playbook from VCS server and run them on the machine executing ansible-pull. It helps invert default push architecture of Ansible into pull architecture.

  • ansible-vault: helps safeguard sensitive information stored in a data file used by Ansible.

Performing actions on localhost Link to heading

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, we’ll perform some actions on localhost using ansible command.

  • Install httpd on our CentOS system:

    $ ansible localhost -m yum --args="name=httpd state=present"

    This tells ansible to execute on localhost, use the module yum and pass additional arguments "name=httpd state=present" to the yum module. As a result of executing this command, httpd package will be installed on the localhost.

  • Start httpd server we just installed:

    $ ansible localhost -m systemd --args="name=httpd state=started"

    This tells ansible to start the httpd server we installed in previous command. It does so using systemd module.

    Check if it was actually started:

    $ curl localhost

  • Enable httpd server to start at boot time:

    $ ansible localhost -m systemd --args="name=httpd enabled=true"

    You can verify that httpd server starts upon boot by rebooting the localhost using the same curl command mentioned earlier.

That’s it for this post Link to heading

In the next post, we will take a look at the concept inventory in Ansible. If you have any comments/feedback/suggestion, please let me know below! Until next time. 😉