Using Ansible playbooks

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Welcome to the Ansible playbooks guide. Playbooks are automation blueprints, in YAML format, that Ansible uses to deploy and configure nodes in an inventory. This guide introduces you to playbooks and then covers different use cases for tasks and plays, such as:

  • Executing tasks with elevated privileges or as a different user.

  • Using loops to repeat tasks for items in a list.

  • Delegating playbooks to execute tasks on different machines.

  • Running conditional tasks and evaluating conditions with playbook tests.

  • Using blocks to group sets of tasks.

You can also learn how to use Ansible playbooks more effectively by creating re-usable files and roles, including and importing playbooks, and running selected parts of a playbook with tags.