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 variables store dynamic values for a given environment.

In our playbook, it is an excellent practice to use variables to store all the dynamic values we need. By editing variables, we can reuse our code in the future, only parameterizing according to our business needs.

# Impermissible variable names


Ansible allows all the combinations of letters and numbers in variable names. If we plan to use numbers, be aware that we can’t use them at the start of the variable names.

The four main limitations in variable names are shown in the table below:



Variable Name Limitations

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In this lesson, we're going to explore the following:

- User-defined variables
- Extra variables
- Host and group variables
- Array variables
- Registered variables

# User-defined variables

User-defined variables are the most popular and the most similar to other programming languages.
The declaration is performed using the `vars` statement followed by a list of each variable and value.
Core variable types are the ones permitted by Python, such as string, number, boolean, list, dictionary, and so on.
We can easily retrieve the variable value in any part of our Ansible playbook specifying the variable name between double brackets, like this: `{{ variable name }}`.

The following `variableprint.yml` playbook declares a variable `fruit`, assigns the value `apple`, and prints using the Ansible `debug` module.



---
- name: Variable print sample
  hosts: all
  vars:
    fruit: "apple"
  tasks:
    - name: Print variable
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: "Print the value of variable {{ fruit }}"

The `variableprint.yml` playbook is similar to the `helloworld.yml` playbook. The syntax and the structure of the element are very similar, except for the presence of the `fruit` variable. Variables store information like strings and numbers, as well as more complex data structures like lists, dictionaries, and so on. In this case, the variable has the name `fruit` and the value `apple` in **line 5** of the file. The `debug` module will concatenate the text `Print the value of the variable` with the value of the variable `fruit` through **lines 8 and 9**. 




Learn about Ansible variables, their different types, why we need them, and how to use them.

Not Allowed	Example
White spaces	`my var`
Dots	`my.var`
Starting with numbers	`1stvar`
Containing special characters	`myvar$1`

Getting Started

Ansible Language

Ansible for Linux

Ansible Troubleshooting

Appendix: Ansible Installation

Conclusion

Variables

Impermissible variable names

Variable Name Limitations

User-defined variables