Gain insights into installing and using Ansible, delve into playbooks and inventory management, and learn about troubleshooting to efficiently automate IT tasks and enhance your IT career.

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In an era of IT environments, automation is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. Ansible, an open-source IT automation tool, has become a go-to solution for streamlining IT tasks. This comprehensive course aims to equip you with both fundamental and advanced Ansible knowledge.

You'll start by installing Ansible, understanding its architecture, and diving into inventory management and playbook creation. Next, you'll explore variables, conditional statements, loops, handlers, roles, and collections. After that, the course dives into Ansible for Linux-specific tasks and troubleshooting techniques to resolve common problems like connection failures, missing parameters, and syntax errors. 

After completing this course, you'll have gained a robust understanding of Ansible, with the ability to create efficient playbooks, manage inventory, troubleshoot common problems, and automate a wide range of IT tasks. These skills will provide a strong foundation for a thriving career in IT infrastructure management.

Automating IT Infrastructure with Ansible

Ansible releases are packaged and distributed in two packages: `ansible-core` and `ansible`.
The `ansible-core` package contains the minimum of the Ansible platform. 
It includes all the command-line tools, the main components, and the `ansible.builtin` collection. The `ansible` community package includes `ansible-core` plus some additional collections.

# Installing an Ansible package

You can choose any of the following ways to install the Ansible community package:

- Install the latest release with our OS package manager for certain Linux distributions.
- Install with `pip` (the Python package manager).

# Ansible core

**Ansible core** is a command-line tool primarily for developers and users who want to install only the necessary collections.




It contains a minimal amount of modules and plugins and allows other collections to be installed. 
Ansible core is the main building block and architecture for Ansible. It includes:

- The command-line interface (CLI) tools (`ansible-playbook`, `ansible-inventory`) for driving and interacting with automation.
- The Ansible language, as well as YAML, creates a set of rules for developing Ansible playbooks and includes functions such as conditionals, blocks, includes loops, and other Ansible imperatives.
- An architectural framework that allows extensions through Ansible collections.
Ansible core releases a new major release approximately twice a year.

## Key points of Ansible core

The following are the key points of the Ansible core package:

- It continues classic Ansible versioning (2.11, then 2.12).
- It does not use semantic versioning.
- It maintains the latest version plus two older versions.
- It includes language, runtime, and built-in plugins.
- It is developed and maintained in the `ansible/ansible` GitHub repository.


# Ansible community

The `ansible` package includes the Ansible language, runtime, and community-curated collections. It recreates and expands on the functionality that was included in Ansible 2.9.
The Ansible community package contains Ansible core with 85+ additional collections containing thousands of modules and plugins.

## Key points of the Ansible community

The key points of the Ansible community package are the following:

- It uses new versioning (6.0.0, then 7.0.0).
- It follows semantic versioning rules.
- It does not use semantic versioning.
- It maintains only one version at a time.
- It includes language, runtime, and selected collections.
- It is developed and maintained in collection repositories.

## What’s inside the Ansible community package?

Each major release of the Ansible community package accepts the latest version of each included collection and the latest released version of `ansible-core`.
Major releases of the Ansible community package can contain breaking changes in the modules and other plugins within the included collections and core features.

Learn how Ansible is packaged and what some of the advantages of the ansible and ansible-core packages are.

Getting Started

Ansible Language

Ansible for Linux

Ansible Troubleshooting

Appendix: Ansible Installation

Conclusion

Ansible Packages

Installing an Ansible package