In previous post, we did a combination of trivial and non-trivial tasks on the command line:

  • install httpd package on the servers in group servers,
  • modify a line in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file to set our desired value for port and
  • set the httpd service into restarted mode.

At the end of the post, I mentioned that we can automate these tasks by writing a playbook. That’s what we’ll do for this post.

Ansible Playbooks Link to heading

As official documentation suggests, playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment and orchestration language. They provide a very nice analogy as well:

If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop, playbooks are your instruction manuals, and your inventory of hosts are your raw material.

With the help of playbooks, we can:

  • download and install packages
  • configure services
  • start/stop/restart server processes
  • perform rolling upgrades
  • interact with load balances and monitoring systems

Playbooks can be used for various things and can have various tasks written in them. It would be nearly impossible to cover each and every aspect of it.

In this post, we will cover its basics by creating a playbook out of the tasks we performed in last post.

Plyabooks are written in YAML format. Each playbook can have one or more ‘plays’ in it. Every play is targeted at a group of hosts (serversin our example.)

Let’s create a playbook (store it in, say, playbook.yaml file) for the tasks we performed in previous post:

---
- hosts: servers
  tasks:
      - name: Install httpd
        yum: name=httpd state=present

      - name: Change port to listen on
        lineinfile:
            path: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
            regexp: "^Listen"
            state: present
            line: "Listen {{ http_port }}"

      - name: Restart and enable the service
        systemd: name=httpd state=restarted enabled=yes

Here we have written only one play and that is for the group servers. tasks is a list of ad-hoc Ansible commmands that we want to execute on the remote hosts in the group servers. Earlier we executed these ad-hoc commands from the command line with ansible command. There are three tasks in this playbook:

  • First task uses yum module to install the httpd package.
  • Second task uses lineinfile module to replace the specific line in the file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf with the one we’re interested in.
  • Third task restarts and enables the httpd server using systemd module.

Let us first uninstall httpd package from the remote systems. This is not really necessary to run the playbook but, we’re doing it to validate that all tasks we did earlier are performed as expected by the playbook.

$ ansible -m yum --args="name=httpd state=absent" servers

And now run the playbook:

$ ansible-playbook playbook.yaml

PLAY [servers]
**************************************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts]
******************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [host1]
ok: [host2]

TASK [Install httpd]
********************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [host1]
changed: [host2]

TASK [Change port to listen on]
*********************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [host2]
changed: [host1]

TASK [Restart and enable the service]
***************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [host1]
changed: [host2]

PLAY RECAP
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
host1                      : ok=4    changed=3    unreachable=0    failed=0   
host2                      : ok=4    changed=3    unreachable=0    failed=0

See how the name we set for every task in the playbook.yaml file is shown in above output. As an aside, execute the very same command again and observe the output. Everything that shows changed in above output will instead show as ok because nothing changed in remote systems as everything was setup just a few seconds back. 😉

That’s it for this post Link to heading

In upcoming posts, we’ll be creating an example application and deploying that using Ansible Playbooks. Although it won’t be as complex as most real-life applications and their deployments, it’ll give a fair idea of how Ansible can be used to deploy non-trivial applications.

If you have any feedback/suggestions, leave it in the comment section at the bottom of the post. Until next time. 😉