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.

ansible.tar.gz

ansible_spa

nginx_demo

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

# Introduction to Ansible ad hoc commands
Ansible provides modules that give us the power to manage our list of hosts. These modules can be referenced from within our playbooks or by using ad hoc commands. **Ad hoc commands** are one-liners that we can run to quickly execute a particular task. The basic syntax of an ad hoc command is shown below:

ansible <hosts> -i <inventory_file> -m <module_name> -a <module_arguments> -u <remote_user> --private-key=<path_to_ssh_key>

The syntax for ad hoc commands includes the following parameters:

- `hosts`: The name of the host or group of hosts against which to run the command.
- `inventory_file`: The path to the inventory file to use. It is optional.
- `module_name`: The Ansible module to run, e.g., `shell`.
- `module_arguments`: The needed arguments for the module in use. 
- `remote_user`: The specific user on the managed node that Ansible uses to execute the command. It is optional.
- `path_to_ssh_key`: The path to the SSH key for the connection. It is optional.

# Working with ad hoc commands

Let's say we want to verify if the time is correct on all the servers that we're managing. We can utilize an ad hoc command for this purpose by calling the `shell` module from our ad hoc command and then executing the shell script to check the date. The command given below shows an example command that we can run against our Linux hosts:

Explore the common ad hoc commands available in Ansible and learn how to use them.

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

Running Ad Hoc Commands

Introduction to Ansible ad hoc commands

Working with ad