Gain insights into Ansible's core features like inventory, playbooks, and roles. Delve into writing playbooks, using Jinja2, and organize tasks for efficient, stable IT infrastructure management.

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Configuration management plays a pivotal role in maintaining a stable and organized IT infrastructure by enabling the systematic gathering of information from remote hosts, facilitating server provisioning, and streamlining application upgrades or deployments.

You will learn the core features of Ansible, such as inventory, variables, playbooks, roles, and handlers, which serve as the building blocks for configuration management. You will learn how to write playbooks that define and execute complex orchestration tasks with ease. Next, you’ll learn how to use roles to maintain consistency across configuration management projects and how to harness the power of Jinja2 to apply logic and control structures and generate configuration files dynamically.

After completing this course, you will be equipped with the necessary skills for customizing configurations, organizing automation tasks efficiently, and maintaining a desired state for your infrastructure.

Configuration Management Using Ansible

# What are tasks?

A task represents a single action within a playbook that we can perform on a managed node. Tasks make up plays and leverage modules to perform specific actions like installing software, copying files, managing users, etc.

In order to define a task, we have to specify a name, the module we'd like to use, and other relevant parameters. Here's the basic syntax for defining a task:

- name: Description of the task
  module_name:
    module_parameter1: value1
    module_parameter2: value2
  # other task options like become, when etc.

In the syntax above, a task contains the following parameters:

- `name`: Describes the task in a human-readable manner, e.g., "Installing NGINX."
- `module_name`: Used to specify the Ansible module to be used in the task in order to achieve the specific action
- `module_parameter`: The arguments that we need to pass to the module that we choose for our task.

A working example of a task is shown below:

- name: Ensure Nginx configtest passes
  command: nginx -t
  register: nginx_config_test
  ignore_errors: yes
  become: yes

- **Line 2:** The task uses the `command` module within an Ansible playbook to execute the `nginx -t` command on a managed node. This command is typically used to perform a configuration test for the NGINX web server and check the validity of the  NGINX configuration files. 

- **Line 3:** We use the `register` parameter to store the result of the `nginx -t` command in a variable named `nginx_config_test`. 

- **Line 4:** We use the `ignore_errors` parameter to indicate that we want to bypass any runtime error. This provides resilience in case of any configuration issues. 

- **Line 5:** We specify the `become: yes` parameter to indicate that the task runs with elevated privileges. This ensures that the task can run with the elevated permissions if required.

## Order of tasks execution
Tasks in Ansible playbooks are executed in the order that we define them. In order to control the sequence of tasks within a playbook, we have to address them accordingly. The tasks given below will execute as arranged, with task one running first, followed by task two, and then task three:

Getting Started

What Is Configuration Management?

Basics of Ansible

Major Concepts in Ansible

Ansible Variables and Other Elements

Manage Configuration with Ansible

Wrap Up

Deploy a Web Application Using Ansible

Ansible Tasks

What are tasks?