As our infrastructure grows, we may have to use secret data of different sensitivity. If our “Infrastructure as Code” is developed by different teams, maybe every team wants to protect their own passwords, API tokens, keys, etc with different Vault passwords. This is why we use IDs in Ansible Vault.
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Sometimes we may want to encrypt only a single variable value or a short piece of text that we need to use in our playbook or role. For example, we may want to encrypt a user password or an API key, and not an entire file. Encrypting single variables is also a good idea when we keep our files in Source Control Management like Git.
Ansible Vault has a function to encrypt only parts of files, to encrypt variables instead of the whole file.
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Templating is a huge work power in Ansible when we want to write reusable code. Just imagine about having to create different playbooks and roles for every host that have a slightly different configuration from each other. That would be nonsense. Luckily we have configuration file templates in Ansible to make our life easier, and…
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Previously we took a look at creating a basic plain text file inventory for our Ansible automation project, but we will need more functionality when we start using it seriously. Luckily Ansible provides us some other ways to create groups of hosts and handle them. Let’s investigate what else can we do in an Ansible…
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Handlers are Ansible’s solution for running specific operations only when other tasks made changes, like when we update the configuration of a web server, and we want to restart the service. Obviously we do not want to restart the Apache2 on every playbook run, only if there is a change in its configuration. This is…
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There are some limitations of using YAML instead of a scripting language or a DSL, but the developers of Ansible thought about the issue, and they integrated some cool, more advanced features into the tool. We can use blocks collecting and handling tasks together Let’s investigate this feature a bit more!
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When we automate configurations we cannot avoid providing secrets to Ansible. The last thing we want is our secret data running around in plain text files on our control node. Luckily Ansible has a tool for this. Ansible Vault is an integrated encryption tool in Ansible to manage sensitive data like passwords, keys and certificates.…
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In a playbook or in a role sometimes we want to run different tasks based on different conditions. In most cases it depends on a fact (detail about the managed host) or some data collected during the playbook run. Ansible conditionals are there to make it possible to run different tasks based on different conditions,…
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Ansible loops and conditional statements are very cool inventions, but they are a double edged sword as well. The limitless freedom they give us can turn our roles into horrible mess. It is our responsibility to balance on the edge and use just the right amount of them in our code while we keep in…
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After we ran ad-hoc commands and created a monolith playbook, we will increase our level of automation. We will separate our code much better with introducing modular, reusable file structures called roles. Ansible roles will load variables, handlers and tasks automatically for us based on a defined directory and file structure.
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Ansible playbooks are YAML files with target host/group information, command execution and some loops and logic. A playbook is a blueprint of an operation on our managed nodes. Playbooks are the first step towards managing infrastructure as code.
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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…
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We all want to work smarter, not harder. (Or at least some of us…) Automating the repetitive tasks was always a huge leap forward even before the “DevOps times” when we wrote shell scripts and Perl code to create automation out of the box. Today we have the luxury of choosing between a lot of…
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