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

An **Ansible template** generates an entire file dynamically using a mix of static content, variable data, and control logic.
The `ansible.builtin.template` module is a flexible and powerful way to generate configuration content. Templates are regular files with embedded controls and variable references.



Ansible template works by taking advantage of the Jinja2 programming language, the Ansible built-in `template` module. The Jinja template file is stored under the `templates` directory.
We can add variable references using the `{{ variable }}` syntax in the template to make the content dynamic.

The files are stored in the Ansible control node. The Ansible template is handy for the service configuration file. 
The Ansible templates help apply some variable values to configuration files.


# Control statements

Control statements in Jinja2, used within Ansible, have a distinct syntax denoted by `{% statement %}`. Jinja2 supports conditional statements using the `{% if ... %}` and `{% endif %}` statements. It provides support for most common Python tests, such as mathematical expressions (`==`, `!=`, `<=`) and membership checks (`in`) within conditional statements. Conditional branches can be handled using `{% elif ... %}` and `{% else %}`.

Jinja2 has a single type of loop called the `for` loop. The `for` loop is initiated with `{% for ... %}` and terminated with `{% endfor %}`. A `for` loop always iterates over a Python sequence, specified as `{% for x in sequence %}`. This loop enables iterating over elements within a sequence and performing actions based on each iteration.


# Example

In the provided example, we have the `template_helloworld.yml` Ansible playbook. This playbook employs the `template` module, which is used to apply a Jinja2 template and populate a variable with custom text. The `template` module replaces specific parts of the target template with the desired text, allowing for dynamic content generation.

By utilizing templates in Ansible, we can achieve greater flexibility and customization in our configurations, as the content can be generated dynamically based on variables and conditions.


Learn how to generate an entire file dynamically using a mix of static content, variable data, and control logic.

Getting Started

Ansible Language

Ansible for Linux

Ansible Troubleshooting

Appendix: Ansible Installation

Conclusion

Template

Introduction to Ansible template