Core components

Question 1

Inventories

Answer 1

how Ansible can locate and run against multiple systems.
Inventories are list of hosts
Can be formatted in ini or yaml
1. ini
mail.example.com
[webservers]
rale.example.com
dale.example.com
[dbservers]
db[1:4].example.com

2. ## yamlall:
   hosts:
   mail.example.com:
   children:
   webservers:
   hosts:
   rail.example.com:
   dale.example.com:
   dbservers:
   hosts:
   db[1:4].example.com:
   …

Question 2

Modules

Answer 2

Tools for particular tasks

Modules take parameters and return json response

Question 3

Variables

Answer 3

Should contain letters, numbers and underscores
Should start with letter
Can be scoped by a group, host, playbook

Question 4

Facts

Answer 4

Provide certain info about a given target host
Facts are discovered by Ansible aoutomatically when it reaches out to a host
Facts gathering can be disabled
ansible -i ansible/inventory.yaml host6.example.com -m setup
=> output will be collection of facts represented

Question 5

Plays

Answer 5

To map a group of hosts to some well-defined roles

A play may use one or more modules to achieve a desired state on a group of hosts

Question 6

Playbooks

Answer 6

Series of plays

Question 7

Config files

Answer 7

Locations in order processing:

1. ANSIBLE_CONFIG (an env var)
2. ansible.cfg (in the current dir)
3. .ansible.cfg (in home dir hidden file)
4. /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg (master config)

Some commonly used settings:
ansible_managed
forks
inventory