Ansible Configuration Management¶

★★★★★ Intermediate

Ansible is an agentless automation tool for orchestration, configuration management, provisioning, and deployment. It connects via SSH and describes desired state in YAML playbooks.

Key Advantages¶

Agentless - no software to install on targets, only SSH access needed
Declarative - describe desired state, Ansible ensures it
Idempotent - running multiple times produces same result
Simple YAML - playbooks are human-readable, version-controllable
Large ecosystem - Ansible Galaxy for community roles

Architecture¶

Control node pushes "modules" to managed nodes via SSH. Modules execute, report results, and are removed.

ANSIBLE_KEEP_REMOTE_FILES=1 ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini playbook.yml -vvv

Inventory¶

[webservers]
www1.example.com
www2.example.com

[dbservers]
db1.example.com

Ad-Hoc Commands¶

ansible all -m ping -i inventory.ini
ansible www1.example.com -i inventory.ini -a "date"

Playbooks¶

- hosts: webservers
  become: yes
  vars:
    http_port: 80
  tasks:
    - name: Install nginx
      apt:
        name: nginx
        state: present

    - name: Start nginx
      service:
        name: nginx
        state: started
        enabled: yes

  handlers:
    - name: restart nginx
      service:
        name: nginx
        state: restarted

Roles¶

Reusable automation units with standardized structure:

ansible-galaxy init myrole     # create skeleton

Structure: defaults/, vars/, tasks/, files/, templates/, meta/

Install from requirements:

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Debugging¶

Verbosity levels: -v to -vvvv. Higher = more detail.

Idempotency¶

Modules check current state before changes. shell/command modules need guards (creates, removes, when) to be idempotent.

Gotchas¶

shell/command modules are not idempotent by default - use creates/removes parameters
YAML indentation errors are the most common issue
become: yes needed for privilege escalation (sudo)