In this article we will look at basics of Ansible and we will cover some more extensive features in later tutorials.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an Infrastructure Automation Tool , widely used for automating day to day management of remote server tasks.

Why Ansible?

Management of multiple  Linux remote Hosts using SSH, in parallel.

Also supports Windows environment using powershell

Easy to use and works out of the box, no overhead of installing extra tools on slave machines . (relies on SSH for controlling)

Uses concept of states in which comparision of current state and the desired state of the task at hand is made, if the condition satisfies , task returns the existing state without running the task .

You can read more about Ansible  : https://www.ansible.com

Main goal of this tutorial : have a centralized server with ansible installed to control remote(slave) machines to run or accomplish a specific task.

Lets Now setup ansible on Server machine.

How To install Ansible ?

You can install Ansible as a python pip package.

> pip install ansible

Once done, create a test project folder and inside it lets create an inventory file named “hosts” . This file is mainly used to define various groups of machine we would like to remotely manage.(use your favourite text editor and save this as content)

content of hosts file :

[myMachine]

127.0.0.1

[remoteMachines]

192.168.1.112

192.168.1.113

As we can see , there are two groups with labels myMachine and remoteMachines to administer different set of machines. myMachine would control my local machine ,whereas the remoteMachines would control other machines in the network.

Note : As a prerequisite the server machine should be configured to auto SSH  to slave machines. ( to avoid specifying parameters on runtime)

now lets run a simple task against myMachine (that is localhost)

> ansible -i hosts   myMachine –connection=local  -m ping

here we can see , -i parameter specifies the inventory file name , in this case its “hosts” . myMachine specifies the group label of the machines for which task has to run. here machines under that label will run the task. “–connection=local” which specifies run the command on localhost (not to use SSH). -m arg specifies the module to be used. Here we are using Ping module.(we will see more in upcoming tutorials)

typical response should be,

127.0.0.1 | success >> {
“changed”: false,
“ping”: “pong”
}

If you have successfully completed this , congratulations! you have run your first ansible task. In upcoming tutorials, we will look at more granular ways of running tasks using concept of roles.

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