Ansible 101 - Episode 4 - Your first real-world playbook

Jeff Geerling (geerlingguy) dives deeper into Ansible playbooks, following material from chapter 4 in the bestselling Ansible book, Ansible for DevOps.

Contents:

00:00 - Intro
04:03 - Questions from last episode
06:58 - It was DNS
07:40 - Ansible content site
09:12 - Our first real-world playbook
22:30 - Adding handlers
24:18 - Installing Java and Solr
40:32 - Checking playbook syntax
41:30 - Running the playbook
45:20 - Testing idempotence
46:00 - Viewing the Solr Dashboard
48:33 - Cowsay quote
49:10 - Outtro

[ThomasRStevenson]

Thank you so much for putting this up on youtube. I am getting so much out of this. All of the other YT tutorials on Ansible I watched where very short and skipped over so much detail I was continually lost, but your videos explain everything, and I greatly appreciate that.

[harikeerthan]

this is the best ansible tutorial available on youtube. thanks for explaining everything in detail.

[JeffGeerling]

0:02 For reference, I was trying to start the live stream for 10 minutes or so, and YouTube kept displaying "Live streaming isn't available right now" — I had to restart my browser, OBS, and stop and start the stream in YouTube's site a couple times, and somehow it started working after all that :)

[ketatgenhorst]

I haven't worked as a Sysadmin role in well over a decade. Back then, I automated many tasks locally with Perl and remotely using expect. Since then, I have just been building boxes to support my work as I go and not thought about scaling. The last three episodes of this made ansible look like a pretty neat tool that might be helpful. This video shows why people talk about it. Wow, this is truly scalable automation.
I can see a lot of things coming up like testing for the latest and auto populating those variables to be sure that when you use it next year you build the current solr. I am going to go pop some corn and run episode 5!

[shwelinhtet]

Thank you for sharing the complete demo and covered all the good stuff. Where i can get to reference those config, playbook..etc.

[queenannsrevenge]

Regarding single and double quotes - the one place I HAVE seen a difference is in the regexp: line in lineinfile and replace modules. I’ve seen the regular expression characters behave differently with double quotes, and as a result I always use single quotes in a regal entry.

Oh, also the mode: directive in the various modules that set permissions like copy, file, and template. The instructions recommend using single quotes for that.

I for one would LOVE examples of molecule use. I tried to use it, but I had a VERY hard time doing so; unlike the Ansible project, the molecule documentation is VERY difficult to understand, perhaps because I never see any examples other than via docker...

[minecraftchest]

I found this series the other day. I have a pi I am reimagining, and I figured it would be a good time to learn Ansible.

[StormWolf]

Thanks for the vids and the free books. It sure is easier to follow with a video, where you discuss things more in details, than with the books, where i spend my time thinking "wait, where do i write what?", or "why does he do that?". For instance, with "ansible for kubernetes", i gave up trying to install solr, as i was completely lost. But thanks to this vid, it's running. Anyway, I'm learning a lot, thanks.

[johnjames_cowperthwaite]

Going slowly through the book and this series Jeff, many many thanks. Keep up the great work!

[laurensdehaan]

And watching the stream with great interest, learning a lot, and looking forward to putting it into practice with a larger farm, from Guyana by way of New York and Oakland, CA. VAGRANT ROCKS! No more PowerEdge 1950 III test server for testing!

[louwrentius]

I’ve been using Ansible professionally a ton an I follow this series to check what I missed. The creates option is unfortunately one of them. Saves a ton of registering vars with stat. Thanks.

[Spydaw]

I finally got my playbook working with my docker solution :D
Thank you again for the awesome video!

[hermannpaschulke]

Thank you so much for this series! I've managed my servers for the longest time now. It's time for something better

[harshvaragiya]

You're the man ! Awesome content...

[ko_kamlesh]

Found you from the reddit while searching ansible-linter for VS code. & watched this video. waiting for live stream today. Amazing. :)

[sachinuplaonkar]

Thank you for these videos! They are of great help when starting out in Ansible! Cheers :D

[suprchrgd]

Another great video! Only thing I take issue with (as a Server Admin) is unpacking everything in /tmp .. when the server gets patched and rebooted, all of that goes away and your ansible code will re-download and unpack everythinig again into /tmp. Much better to have an agreed-upon disk, mount, etc, that doesn't go away on a reboot.

[simoonYT]

Świetny film! Dostał ode mnie aplauz za 10, 00 zł 👏

[georgelza]

... it was DNS... was me this past week, tying to build something in AWS. kept on thinking, Security Groups, maybe it is NatGW, no... it's Route Tables... nope, it was DNS...

[JelleSebreghts]

42:57 Can you also run it on your local machine? You mentioned earlier you had ansible playbooks to setup your mac. Do you run them from an other machine and ssh into the mac, or how does that work?