After we installed Ansible and tested that it works well, then we want to make it work for us. There are three methods Ansible can operate. The first one is running so called ad-hoc commands with the ansible command line tool. The second option is to write re-usable code (playbooks, roles and variables) and run them with the ansible-playbook command. Both commands use the push mechanism to interact with the controlled nodes. A third option is a tool called ansible-pull that (as its name suggests) pulls the configuration onto a managed machine from a source code management repo. Let’s take a look at the easiest method, the ad-hoc commands first!