First Ansible Playbook

In the previous post , we looked at getting up and running with Ansible, including using the ad-hoc mode to send commands to our servers. We had a inventory file called hosts that had groups of server IP addresses and a simple ansible.cfg file that pointed to our inventory file.

Playbooks

Ansible playbooks are used to collect together a description of the state we want in a server. When the playbook is executed, Ansible figures out what things need need changed, and changes them. If you’re used to the procedural nature of a bash script, where things proceed from one step to the next, and there might be decision branches, this requires an adjustment in your thinking. This is similar to the adjustment I had getting my head around SwiftUI , and moving from JS to React .