Playbooks

• Hosts
• Users
• Priviledge Escalation
• Tasks
• Handlers
• Roles
• Include
  • Play Include
  • Task Include
  • Static and Dynamic Includes
• Executing Playbooks
  • Passing Variables
• Variables
  • Rules of Variables
  • Inventory Variables
  • Playbook Variables
  • Included files and roles
  • Registered Variables
  • Accessing Variable Data
  • Variable Precedence
  • Ansible Facts
  • Using Variables in Jinja Templates
  • Using Variables in Tasks
  • Jinja Filters
  • Python Methods
• Loops
  • Standard Loops
  • Nested Loops
  • Looping with Hashes
  • Looping with Files
  • Looping with Fileglobs
  • Looping with Subelements
  • Registered Variables with Loops
  • Looping over Inventory
• Blocks
  • Grouping tasks
  • Error Handing
• Best Practices
  • Repository Layout
  • Use Dynamic Inventory when Possible
  • How to seperate Staging vs Production
  • Version Control
  • Vault

Ansible’s configuration language is put into a Playbook. Playbooks have many components including hosts, variables, tasks, etc. We will cover all of these components and more throughout this section. Another way to look at playbooks is as a instruction for Ansible to orchestrate, provision, deploy, and configure your environment.

Playbooks can contain a list one or multiple plays. Each play can target the same or different systems, but plays are usually targetted to a specific group of systems.

Here is an example playbook containing a single play.

---
- hosts: all
  vars:
    controller_version: latest
  roles:
    - role: avinetworks.docker
    - role: avinetworks.avicontroller
      con_version: "{{ controller_version }}"

As you can see it’s also in YAML format which we’ve covered earlier.