Working With Playbooks

If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop, playbooks are your instruction manuals, and your inventory of hosts are your raw material.

While there’s a lot of information here, there’s no need to learn everything at once. You can start small and pick up more featuresover time as you need them.

You should look at while reading along with the playbook documentation. These illustrate best practices as well as how to put many of the various concepts together.

• Intro to Playbooks
  • Playbook Language Example
  • Action Shorthand
  • Executing A Playbook
  • Tips and Tricks
• • Including and Importing
  • Dynamic vs. Static
  • Tradeoffs and Pitfalls Between Includes and Imports
• • Creating valid variable names
  • Defining variables in a playbook
  • Using variables with Jinja2
  • Hey wait, a YAML gotcha
  • Registering variables
  • Accessing information about other hosts with magic variables
  • Passing variables on the command line
• Templating (Jinja2)
  • Tests
  • Python Version and Templating
• • The When Statement
  • Loading in Custom Facts
  • Conditional Imports
  • Register Variables
• Loops
  • Complex loops
  • Do-Until Loops
  • Looping over the inventory
  • Migrating from with_X to loop
• • Error Handling
• • Understanding Privilege Escalation
  • Playbook Debugger
  • Setting the Environment (and Working With Proxies)
  • Error Handling In Playbooks
  • Working With Plugins
  • Tags
  • Start and Step
  • Lookups
• Strategies
• Best Practices
  • Staging vs Production
  • Always Mention The State
  • Operating System and Distribution Variance
  • Whitespace and Comments
  • Keep It Simple
  • Variables and Vaults