When Scale landed on my lap, I didn’t speak Ansible. I don’t know that I would say I do, today, but I’ve certainly ground out a bunch of playbooks that have made the process a lot more palatable, and made the care and feeding of my clusters more manageable.
Server Build
See more: Ansible Basics: Server and Version Control
Ansible Parts and Pieces
There are only a few things to know to get started with Ansible, and they are fairly straightforward, if you know the vocabulary. I’ve expanded these into their own topics.
See more: Ansible Basics: Inventory
See more: Ansible Basics: Variables
So now we’re set up! Onward to running playbooks.
Running the Playbooks
On your ansible host, now that you’ve got your inventory and variables, its time to write a playbook that DOES something! I’ll post some examples of those in other topics, but the anatomy of the command is as follows:
ansible-playbook playbookname.yaml -e@vars.yaml -i inventory.yaml -l "100" -e "other_variables=1"
We can take this apart pretty easily!
ansible-playbookis the binary we’re running, the application that processes the whole mess.playbookname.yamlis the file that tells ansible what it’s doing.-e@vars.yamlis our big variable file. We reference it here-i inventory.yamlis the inventory file, which will specifiy the hosts that this playbook will target. We reference it here-l "100"allows us to “limit” the playbook run to a comma separated list. In this example, we are only running this playbook on the host “100”.-e "other_variables=1"allows us to specify any other variables that are not in our vars.yaml
Here is the playbook tag, that’ll show you all the topics posted about playbooks!
Interpreting Results
– more soon here –