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Working with playbooks

Playbooks record and execute Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration functions. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.

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

At a basic level, playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines. At a more advanced level, they can sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates, and can delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way.

Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language. There are multiple ways to organize playbooks and the files they include, and we’ll offer up some suggestions on that and making the most out of Ansible.

You should look at Example Playbooks while reading along with the playbook documentation. These illustrate best practices as well as how to put many of the various concepts together.

• Templating (Jinja2)
• Using filters to manipulate data
  • Handling undefined variables
  • Defining different values for true/false/null (ternary)
  • Managing data types
  • Formatting data: YAML and JSON
  • Combining and selecting data
  • Randomizing data
  • Managing list variables
  • Selecting from sets or lists (set theory)
  • Calculating numbers (math)
  • Managing network interactions
  • Hashing and encrypting strings and passwords
  • Manipulating text
  • Manipulating strings
  • Managing UUIDs
  • Handling dates and times
  • Getting Kubernetes resource names
• Tests
  • Test syntax
  • Testing strings
  • Vault
  • Testing truthiness
  • Comparing versions
  • Set theory tests
  • Testing if a list contains a value
  • Testing if a list value is True
  • Testing paths
  • Testing size formats
  • Testing task results
  • Type Tests
• Lookups
  • Using lookups in variables
• Python3 in templates
  • Dictionary views
  • dict.iteritems()
• The now function: get the current time
• Loops
  • Comparing loop and with_*
  • Standard loops
  • Registering variables with a loop
  • Complex loops
  • Ensuring list input for loop: using query rather than lookup
  • Adding controls to loops
  • Migrating from with_X to loop
• Controlling where tasks run: delegation and local actions
  • Tasks that cannot be delegated
  • Delegating tasks
  • Delegation and parallel execution
  • Delegating facts
  • Local playbooks
• Conditionals
  • Basic conditionals with when
  • Debugging conditionals
  • Commonly-used facts
• Blocks
  • Grouping tasks with blocks
  • Handling errors with blocks
• Handlers: running operations on change
  • Handler example
  • Notifying handlers
  • Naming handlers
  • Controlling when handlers run
  • Using variables with handlers
  • Handlers in roles
  • Includes and imports in handlers
  • Meta tasks as handlers
  • Limitations
• Error handling in playbooks
  • Ignoring failed commands
  • Ignoring unreachable host errors
  • Resetting unreachable hosts
  • Handlers and failure
  • Defining failure
  • Defining “changed”
  • Ensuring success for command and shell
  • Aborting a play on all hosts
  • Controlling errors in blocks
• Setting the remote environment
  • Setting the remote environment in a task
• Working with language-specific version managers
• Re-using Ansible artifacts
  • Creating re-usable files and roles
  • Re-using playbooks
  • When to turn a playbook into a role
  • Re-using files and roles
  • Re-using tasks as handlers
• Roles
  • Role directory structure
  • Storing and finding roles
  • Using roles
  • Role argument validation
  • Running a role multiple times in one play
  • Using role dependencies
  • Embedding modules and plugins in roles
  • Sharing roles: Ansible Galaxy
• Module defaults
  • Module defaults groups
• Interactive input: prompts
  • Hashing values supplied by vars_prompt
  • Allowing special characters in vars_prompt values
• Using Variables
  • Creating valid variable names
  • Simple variables
  • When to quote variables (a YAML gotcha)
  • Boolean variables
  • List variables
  • Dictionary variables
  • Registering variables
  • Referencing nested variables
  • Transforming variables with Jinja2 filters
  • Where to set variables
  • Variable precedence: Where should I put a variable?
  • Using advanced variable syntax
• Discovering variables: facts and magic variables
  • Ansible facts
  • Information about Ansible: magic variables
• Playbook Example: Continuous Delivery and Rolling Upgrades
  • What is continuous delivery?
  • Site deployment
  • Reusable content: roles
  • Configuration: group variables
  • The rolling upgrade
  • Managing other load balancers
  • Continuous delivery end-to-end