First Glance at Ansible

What is ansible

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. Ansible is written in Python and uses OpenSSH for transport.

Hands-on Ansible

1. Install ansible on a Linux machine, which is called control node. Use "ssh-keygen" and "ssh-copy-id"commands to generate ssh key and copy it to managed nodes for authentication
2. Playbooks are the simplest way in Ansible to automate repeating tasks in the form of reusable and consistent configuration files. Playbooks are scripts defined in YAML files and contain any ordered set of steps to be executed on managed nodes.

[My first playbook]

• hosts: webserver remote_user: whocare

tasks:

• name: make ~/whocare directory
  ansible.builtin.file:
  path: ~/whocare
  state: directory

• name: Copy file
  copy:
  src: /home/whocare.deb
  dest: /home/whocare.deb
  owner: whocare
  group: whocare
  mode: '0700'

• name: install whocare
  become: true
  become_method: sudo
  ansible.builtin.apt:
  deb: /home/whocare.deb

• name: copy dat file to /opt/Tanium/TaniumClient
  become: true
  become_method: sudo # need "-K" parameter, which is short form "--ask-become-pass". $ ansible-playbook <1.yaml> -K.
  copy:
  src: /home/whocare.dat
  dest: /opt/whocare.dat

• name: restart service
  become: true
  become_method: sudo
  service:
  name: whocare
  state: restarted