In previous Ansible tutorials we saw how easy it is to understand the basic concepts of this fantastic automation tool, how to write our first playbooks, how to organize tasks into roles, and how to use Ansible Vault to protect sensitive data. This time, we focus on an interactive tool which let us execute tasks on the fly, targeting single hosts or host groups: the Ansible console.
ansible
How to setup GNOME using Ansible
GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is probably the most used graphical environment in the Linux ecosystem, if only because all major Linux distributions such as Fedora, RHEL, Debian and Ubuntu ship with it as the default desktop. GNOME strives for simplicity and ease of use, and for this reason, not without some criticisms by a part of the Linux community, tends to be less customizable than other desktop environments such as KDE Plasma or XFCE. Instead of using plaintext configuration files, GNOME stores its settings in the dconf database, which can be manipulated using the “dconf-editor” GUI, or from the command line using the “dconf” utility.
Introduction to Ansible roles
Ansible is a free and open source provisioning system written in Python and sponsored by Red Hat. In previous tutorials we learned the Ansible basics, and we saw how to organize tasks in playbooks and how to secure sensitive data using ansible-vault. There is another, very important concept we need to focus on when dealing with Ansible: roles.
Ansible Vault Tutorial
In previous tutorials we discussed Ansible, a great tool we can use for automation and provisioning. We talked about basic Ansible concepts, we saw some of the most used Ansible modules, how to manage variables and how to perform basic loops in playbooks; now it’s time to see how to protect sensitive information which sometimes may be needed to accomplish some tasks. In order to protect sensitive information when using Ansible, we encrypt them with Ansible Vault.
Introduction to Ansible prompts and runtime variables
This tutorial is part of a series we dedicated to Ansible. Previously we talked about the Ansible basics, then we focused on some Ansible modules we can use to perform some very common administration tasks, and we also talked about Ansible loops. In this article, instead, we learn how to create interactive prompts we can use to ask for user input and how to pass variables at runtime.
How to perform administration operations with Ansible modules
In previous tutorials we introduced Ansible and we discussed Ansible loops. This time we learn the basic usage of some modules we can use inside playbooks to perform some of the most common system administration operations.
Introduction to YAML with Examples
YAML is a data serialization language. The name itself is a recursive acronym which stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language. It is specifically designed to be human-friendly, easy to read and write, to represent settings and data structures and to work well with modern programming languages.
Ansible loops examples and introduction
In a previous article we talked about Ansible, a very useful provisioning free and open source software written in Python, which we can use to automate tasks on multiple machines. We saw how to install it on some of the most used Linux distributions and the basic concepts behind its usage.