Configuration Management With Ansible: A Whirlwind Tour

A crash course on deployment and configuration management with Ansible. This video acts as a basic Ansible tutorial (a general introduction to Ansible for beginners). Anyone using Linux for System Administration, DevOps, or Development should be familiar with this tool.

Why choose Ansible vs Chef or Puppet?
-easiest to get started with
-no agents, no client/server
-done over SSH
-Ansible can scale to thousands of hosts
-Ansible uses Python, yay!

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Ansible in 10 minutes

-we are not covering everything, just the stuff I think is most important
-these are the things you'll be doing with Ansible MOST of the time

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Super-simple ansible tutorial:

apt-get install ansible

We want to set up a new machine

# prep the machine
-- add sshkey (or install sshpass and use --ask-pass)
-- install python, python-apt

-install zsh tmux
-SSH config file (templating)

# Ansible Development Workflow:
-write some stuff
-run some stuff
-check if everything actually worked
-fix bugs, run again
-repeat

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A larger Ansible project

mkdir -p basics/{group_vars,roles}/
touch group_vars/all
mkdir -p roles/common/{files,handlers,tasks,templates}

tree .

[DanielStinebaugh]

Awesome intro video to ansible, this has helped alot thanks for putting it out! Any chance you'll be looking at automating something like packer in the future?

[khizernaeem]

Thank you. Exactly what I was looking for to get started with ansible. Thumbs up :)

[lvond]

Survey taken. Your videos can be as long or short. Depends on the topic. Love what you are doing.

[nsheridan]

That's exactly what I was after really good concise explanation and I don't know how to pronounce idempotent either!!!

[kalyancloud]

Hi, Your videos are awesome but i am very fresh to Ansible, can you provide the video links in orderwise

[retrw]

hi thank for the video is really good, its very clean, i would like to know how its work in windows, i cant find a good tutorial video, maybe you can upload a nice one, thank in advance

[rohitsrmuniv]

I followed you for linux tutorial, a great tutorial indeed and this was a small tutorial with lot of information.
Thanks for sharing this video:)

[EchoWithEmo]

any near-production with ansible latest version ?

[crisdalecabanlit]

Hey Dave! Do you have some tutorial of downloading snapshot in vultr?

[tieubaoeptrai]

Hi there,
I got error:

ERROR: Syntax Error while loading YAML script, site.yml
Note: The error may actually appear before this position: line 8, column 3

roles:
- common
^

please, help me

[Spykedjadedragon]

This was super clear, concise and got to the point of how to use this tool effectively. LOVED IT! Especially since just reading about it can get confusing...

[pakutharivalar]

Well done.
Question: When I stdout a config, how do I insert date and time ?

[vitusyu]

Good. could you tell me what editor application you are using in the video ?

[Deslife]

How did u take this screencast in i3wm? :D

[HigherPlanes]

Great introductory tutorial. Configuration management is def on my list of things to learn, just not sure whether to devl into puppet or Ansible.

[etcpriority]

Do we have any CLI command to generate such default hierarchy ?

[joselazovargas]

Great work! Do you have those files in any repo or gist? Thanks!

[drewerving]

Dave never ceases to amaze. Thanks once again sir!