Ansible

Redhat's solution for automating server tasks.

Ansible uses .yaml (YAML ain't markup language) to define what they call a playbook which is a series of commands that are run in order based on how the script is defined.

Setup

Ansible is most often used on a host that configures other machines, the machine where all the ansible functions are defined and where you use the ansible CLI tools is called the Control node, the devices you are managing are called managed nodes

/etc/ansible directory holds the configuration in ansible.cfg file, the hosts that you wish to connect to over ssh in the hosts file, and the inventory of servers and their tags in the inventory.yaml file.

examples:

• hosts file

[myservers]
root@jacktrusler.com
root@jsonbateman.com

[redhat]
root@jacktrusler.com

ansible all --list-hosts
ansible all -m ping

• inventory.yaml file

myservers:
  hosts:
    root@jsonbateman:
      ansible_host: root@jsonbateman.com
    root@jacktrusler:
      ansible_host: root@jacktrusler.com
redhat:
  hosts:
    root@jsonbateman:
      ansible_host: root@jsonbateman.com

ansible myservers -m ping -i inventory.yaml

after that you can define a playbook anywhere and ansible will look for the configured files in the etc/ansible directory. It should also look in the ~/.ansible directory but I haven't tried that yet.

example playbook:

- name: Ping Servers
  hosts: myservers
  tasks:
    - name: Ping hosts
      ansible.builtin.ping:
- name: Update servers
  hosts: redhat
  tasks:
    - name: Upgrade all packages
      ansible.builtin.dnf:
        name: "*"
        state: latest

here's some builtin dnf functions

Running Locally

ansible docs are pretty straightforward on how to run local scripts