Ansible Documentation
Ansible’s main goals are simplicity and ease-of-use. It also has a strong focus on security and reliability, featuring a minimum of moving parts, usage of OpenSSH for transport (with other transports and pull modes as alternatives), and a language that is designed around auditability by humans–even those not familiar with the program.
We believe simplicity is relevant to all sizes of environments, so we design for busy users of all types: developers, sysadmins, release engineers, IT managers, and everyone in between. Ansible is appropriate for managing all environments, from small setups with a handful of instances to enterprise environments with many thousands of instances.
Ansible manages machines in an agent-less manner. There is never a question of how toupgrade remote daemons or the problem of not being able to manage systems because daemons are uninstalled. Because OpenSSH is one of the most peer-reviewed open source components, security exposure is greatly reduced. Ansible is decentralized–it relies on your existing OS credentials to control access to remote machines. If needed, Ansible can easily connect with Kerberos, LDAP, and other centralized authentication management systems.
This documentation covers the version of Ansible noted in the upper left corner of this page. We maintain multiple versions of Ansible and of the documentation, so please be sure you are using the version of the documentation that covers the version of Ansible you’re using. For recent features, we note the version of Ansible where the feature was added.
Installation, Upgrade & Configuration
Using Ansible
Contributing to Ansible
Extending Ansible
- Adding modules and plugins locally
- Ansible module development: getting started
- Conventions, tips, and pitfalls
- Debugging modules
- Windows module development walkthrough
- Information for submitting a group of modules
- The lifecycle of an Ansible module
- Developing dynamic inventory
- Python API
- Appendix: Module Utilities
- Cisco ACI Guide
- Microsoft Azure Guide
- CloudStack Cloud Guide
- Getting Started with Docker
- Google Cloud Platform Guide
- Continuous Delivery and Rolling Upgrades
- Using Vagrant and Ansible
Ansible for VMWare
Ansible for Network Automation
Reference & Appendices
- Playbook Keywords
- Return Values
- YAML Syntax
- Release and maintenance
- Sanity Tests
- Glossary
- Special Variables
Roadmaps